A familiar story of a woman's sacrifice for the son who was taken from her as a child. Lord knows how many times the plot's been recycled. In 1933, before television, it was presumed that audiences forgot most movies within a year or two so -- change a few names, shift a few relationships, different actors, different titles, and -- voila! A refurbished model! The same concept is continually reborn. It's like Hinduism.
In this avatar, Ruth Chatterton is Jenny Sandoval, a girl from the San Francisco slums in 1906. Her old man runs a notorious "saloon" on the Barbary Coast. Jenny herself, a fundamentally decent girl, is pregnant by her boyfriend who want to make an honorable woman of her, but her Dad objects because the b/f lacks prospects. Before the conflict can be resolved, KaBoom, the earthquake -- and nicely done on a small scale, too, for its budget.
Well, to make a long story short, both boyfriend and father are done in by the quake, Jenny gives birth to a boy who is taken from her by a prosperous family. Jenny never sees him and he, in turn, believes his adoptive family to be his birth family. He grows up to be a tough, crime-fighting District Attorney.
Jenny grows older and become instrumental to a bootlegging organization led by Louis Calhern. Calhern threatens to expose her real identity to the up-and-coming District Attorney and Jenny shoots him as he's about to enter the DA's office and spill the beans. She is prosecuted and convicted of murder by her own son. Before she is hanged, she makes her loyal Chinese Amah, Helen Jerome Eddy, promise to burn the scrapbook and all other evidence that she, Jenny, is the true mother of the District Attorney. End of story.
I found it barely interesting enough to follow. I'd hoped for a happy ending of some kind, some small reward for having sat through this, but it wasn't forthcoming. The climactic scene in which the unwitting DA visits his own mother on death row just before the hanging, asks her to help him save her life, and she refuses to tell him her secret, reminded me of the days I was an usher in the Yiddish theater in Newark. The final scene had the mother rushing in and sobbing on her son's knee -- while he was already strapped into the electric chair.
But I can see why this formula might be a success. There is action and crime and gun play for the men, punctuating a story that is otherwise the kind of weeper that is likely to appeal to the women in the audience.
There are some likable character actors in the cast. Ruth Chatterton and Louis Calhern and the rest turn in performances of professional character, not more than that.
You can't find the Barbary Coast today, worse luck. Beer, dancing ladies, and cathouses. It was located around Pacific and Balboa Streets in an area adjacent to downtown and today consists largely of uninteresting brick buildings with shops and professional offices, the kind of city neighborhood that is always deserted on weekends.
You might enjoy this film for the same reasons that the original audiences did. There's a little something for everyone. And it helps also if you view it as a kind of moment in time captured on film. There we have the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. It seems astronomically remote to us. Yet it was only 26 years later that this movie was released and the earthquake was still relatively fresh in the memory of contemporary audiences. Vietnam is farther from us than the earthquake was from them.
In this avatar, Ruth Chatterton is Jenny Sandoval, a girl from the San Francisco slums in 1906. Her old man runs a notorious "saloon" on the Barbary Coast. Jenny herself, a fundamentally decent girl, is pregnant by her boyfriend who want to make an honorable woman of her, but her Dad objects because the b/f lacks prospects. Before the conflict can be resolved, KaBoom, the earthquake -- and nicely done on a small scale, too, for its budget.
Well, to make a long story short, both boyfriend and father are done in by the quake, Jenny gives birth to a boy who is taken from her by a prosperous family. Jenny never sees him and he, in turn, believes his adoptive family to be his birth family. He grows up to be a tough, crime-fighting District Attorney.
Jenny grows older and become instrumental to a bootlegging organization led by Louis Calhern. Calhern threatens to expose her real identity to the up-and-coming District Attorney and Jenny shoots him as he's about to enter the DA's office and spill the beans. She is prosecuted and convicted of murder by her own son. Before she is hanged, she makes her loyal Chinese Amah, Helen Jerome Eddy, promise to burn the scrapbook and all other evidence that she, Jenny, is the true mother of the District Attorney. End of story.
I found it barely interesting enough to follow. I'd hoped for a happy ending of some kind, some small reward for having sat through this, but it wasn't forthcoming. The climactic scene in which the unwitting DA visits his own mother on death row just before the hanging, asks her to help him save her life, and she refuses to tell him her secret, reminded me of the days I was an usher in the Yiddish theater in Newark. The final scene had the mother rushing in and sobbing on her son's knee -- while he was already strapped into the electric chair.
But I can see why this formula might be a success. There is action and crime and gun play for the men, punctuating a story that is otherwise the kind of weeper that is likely to appeal to the women in the audience.
There are some likable character actors in the cast. Ruth Chatterton and Louis Calhern and the rest turn in performances of professional character, not more than that.
You can't find the Barbary Coast today, worse luck. Beer, dancing ladies, and cathouses. It was located around Pacific and Balboa Streets in an area adjacent to downtown and today consists largely of uninteresting brick buildings with shops and professional offices, the kind of city neighborhood that is always deserted on weekends.
You might enjoy this film for the same reasons that the original audiences did. There's a little something for everyone. And it helps also if you view it as a kind of moment in time captured on film. There we have the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. It seems astronomically remote to us. Yet it was only 26 years later that this movie was released and the earthquake was still relatively fresh in the memory of contemporary audiences. Vietnam is farther from us than the earthquake was from them.