Static camera work makes this film version of an ancient Broadway play all the more theatrical and creaky. It's all about the society sexual goings on of a stuffy family where the stuffy Tyrell Davis is now married to the much younger Catherine Dale Owen whom he treats with kid gloves but more like a trophy hanging around his neck rather than a wife. A society party throws Davis's father (Lewis Stone) together with his dowager ex-wife (Alison Skipworth), the mother of his sons, and it is pretty obvious that the other son is more entranced with his sister-in-law than both sons are with the return of their real mother. Toss in another suitor (Paul Cavanaugh) for Ms. Owen and you have enough confusion for a dozen of these drawing room comedies.
Everybody is directed to speak slowly and in "round tones" that you half expect one of them to start speaking limericks or rhythmic dialog to practice their early sound era diction. This aspect makes for an extremely slow moving version of the Somerset Maugham play "The Circle" where the men's helium filled voices sound surprisingly feminine and the women speak so slowly that they sound twice their age. At times, the film becomes extremely intolerable. Mary Forbes has one amusing scene as an imperious matron, and Skipworth tries her best to overcome the weaknesses of the script and the direction on how to speak that she was given. Her participation in this makes me believe that she might have been a last minute replacement for Marie Dressler who probably wisely turned it down. At less than an hour, this is still atrocious and probably best to just avoid.
Everybody is directed to speak slowly and in "round tones" that you half expect one of them to start speaking limericks or rhythmic dialog to practice their early sound era diction. This aspect makes for an extremely slow moving version of the Somerset Maugham play "The Circle" where the men's helium filled voices sound surprisingly feminine and the women speak so slowly that they sound twice their age. At times, the film becomes extremely intolerable. Mary Forbes has one amusing scene as an imperious matron, and Skipworth tries her best to overcome the weaknesses of the script and the direction on how to speak that she was given. Her participation in this makes me believe that she might have been a last minute replacement for Marie Dressler who probably wisely turned it down. At less than an hour, this is still atrocious and probably best to just avoid.