Mary Morris is the head of a rich old family on Fifth Avenue. Her younger sister, Ann Revere, and half-brother Kent Taylor live there. She controls the family fortune. She also controls the family, objecting when Taylor proposes to marry Evelyn Venable. * She's a nurse who works for Taylor's friend, Dr. Colin Tapley. Taylor may love her, says Miss Morris, but what what Miss Venable loves is the vast wealth of the family. She also starts playing mind games with her new sister-in-law. Taylor and Venable wish to move up to Westchester, but Miss Morris confounds them, keeping her family close about her. It all comes to a head when she accuses Miss Venable of carrying on an affair with Tapley.
I can understand why people enjoyed this full-blooded melodrama, but I found it rather disagreeable, with Miss Morris' character thoroughly objectionable, Taylor a wet rag, Miss Revere a terrified ninny, and Miss Venable long-suffering. They're one-note characters, a hallmark of old-fashioned mellers, but it's hard to take any of them seriously. I grew up at the edges of big, old money, and that's not a way any of them would have behaved; even my great-aunt Esther knew you couldn't be such an obvious creep. You needed some subtlety.
Still, it's all put together in a highly workmanlike fashion in Charles Vidor's second credited feature. Harry Fishbeck's shadow-filled photography captures the dusty and gloomy feeling that the show envisages, and Miss Morris gives a performance as a vile crone at the age of 39 that would have gotten her thrown out of my mother's bridge game, after her sister had trimmed her thoroughly.
*interestingly, Miss Venable's character is named Anne Darrow, just like Fay Wray's character in KING KONG.
