I was waiting for a big dramatic payoff in this film version of the Philip Yordan, the first of two, featuring Paulette Goddard in arguably her finest performance. At least she's contemporary, rather than her miscasting as Lucretia Borgia or the biblical queen Jezebel. Disowned by her judgmental father Oscar Homolka (who turned into an embittered alcoholic), she's spent three years walking the seaports of Brooklyn until he comes to find her, supposedly because her mother is ailing.
As it turns out, he wants her back for financial reasons, and they're not very logical. The son of a family friend has purchased a farm nearby them and has $4000 in spending money that brother-in-law Broderick Crawford (married to sister Mary Wickes) licks his lips over. Goddard initially wants nothing to do with the idealistic William Bishop, normally going for more exciting guys like sailor John Ireland, and unaware that she's being used a pawn slowly falls for him.
While Goddard is great and Wickes gets some funny lines, the men in this family are genuinely awful. In fact of the men, only Bishop has any decency. Squeaky voiced Dennie Moore (best known as the gossipy manacurist in "The Women") steals her scenes as the Brooklyn dive bar waitress, and there are good bits by Esther Dale as a restaurant owner and Grayce Hampton as the fur wearing drunken dowager. Irving Rapper directs this like it's a filmed stage production, yet the needed darkness of the play seems wasted on screen, like an "Anna Christie" wannabe that comes off weaker because of how ordinary it all seems.
As it turns out, he wants her back for financial reasons, and they're not very logical. The son of a family friend has purchased a farm nearby them and has $4000 in spending money that brother-in-law Broderick Crawford (married to sister Mary Wickes) licks his lips over. Goddard initially wants nothing to do with the idealistic William Bishop, normally going for more exciting guys like sailor John Ireland, and unaware that she's being used a pawn slowly falls for him.
While Goddard is great and Wickes gets some funny lines, the men in this family are genuinely awful. In fact of the men, only Bishop has any decency. Squeaky voiced Dennie Moore (best known as the gossipy manacurist in "The Women") steals her scenes as the Brooklyn dive bar waitress, and there are good bits by Esther Dale as a restaurant owner and Grayce Hampton as the fur wearing drunken dowager. Irving Rapper directs this like it's a filmed stage production, yet the needed darkness of the play seems wasted on screen, like an "Anna Christie" wannabe that comes off weaker because of how ordinary it all seems.