A Norma Shearer soap opera about a free-spirited woman and her alcoholic attorney father (Lionel Barrymore) who stand together against the disapproving snobbery of their family. Shearer falls in love with a thug who her father defended in court (Clark Gable), and finds that her father's talk about the second chances due to troubled souls does not extend to them when they're dating his daughter. The pair enter into an agreement: she'll stop seeing the thug if he'll stop drinking. Things take appropriately outlandish and melodramatic turns when Shearer's former fiancée (Leslie Howard) gets involved, kills Gable, and finds himself being defended in court by who?.....you guessed it, good old Barrymore, who just has time to finish an impassioned plea for the man's life before dropping dead.
Whew, that's a lot to pack into a 90 minute film. There's not much of note about this movie except for the good performances of Shearer and Barrymore (though she was better in the previous year's melodrama, "The Divorcée") and its frank treatment of alcoholism. Had this come out a few years later, after the Production Code was firmly in place, the film would not have even been able to admit that alcoholism existed.
Grade: B
Whew, that's a lot to pack into a 90 minute film. There's not much of note about this movie except for the good performances of Shearer and Barrymore (though she was better in the previous year's melodrama, "The Divorcée") and its frank treatment of alcoholism. Had this come out a few years later, after the Production Code was firmly in place, the film would not have even been able to admit that alcoholism existed.
Grade: B