Pauline Lord gets top billing as Clarissa Phelps, a lower-class English shop keeper with a young son, Richard. She wants a better life for him than she's had, so she finds a homeless, alcoholic WW1 vet named Randolph Courtney (Basil Rathbone), a former member of the upper classes, and brings him home, giving him room and board in exchange for teaching her son to act like a respectable member of society. Richard grows into manhood (Louis Hayward), at which point he sets out to make a name for himself, becoming involved with society girl Pauline (Wendy Barrie).
Pauline Lord was a major star of the American and British stage, highly respected for starring in the original productions of Anna Christie, Strange Interlude, and many others. She only appeared in two films, 1934's Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, and this one. She decided films weren't for her, and never made another, eventually dying in a car crash at age 60 in 1950. I can't speak for that previous film, but this one wouldn't endear me to the art form, either. It's a tired rehash of "suffering mother" tropes that had already become cliches before sound entered pictures. I watched this for Basil, who's good in a promising role, but although he received second billing, behind only Lord, both he and she are relegated to the back burner once Hayward enters the film, and it becomes a tedious romantic triangle between Hayward, Wendy Barrie and Westman. Things liven up a bit when Niven is around as another suitor of Barrie's, but that isn't often enough.
Pauline Lord was a major star of the American and British stage, highly respected for starring in the original productions of Anna Christie, Strange Interlude, and many others. She only appeared in two films, 1934's Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, and this one. She decided films weren't for her, and never made another, eventually dying in a car crash at age 60 in 1950. I can't speak for that previous film, but this one wouldn't endear me to the art form, either. It's a tired rehash of "suffering mother" tropes that had already become cliches before sound entered pictures. I watched this for Basil, who's good in a promising role, but although he received second billing, behind only Lord, both he and she are relegated to the back burner once Hayward enters the film, and it becomes a tedious romantic triangle between Hayward, Wendy Barrie and Westman. Things liven up a bit when Niven is around as another suitor of Barrie's, but that isn't often enough.