Pauline Stark has been reared by her aunt, who hates her. Her only friend is her dog. Composer Lew Cody, vacationing in Canada, comes across her, and they fall in love. Her offers her marriage, but she has no name and refuses, so he returns to New York to compose and debut his new symphony named for her, and she gives birth to his daughter. The symphony, however, is a flop, and her aunt, to complete Pauline's shame at an illegitimate daughter, tells her that she stole Pauline from her noble father when he abandoned her. Then she kicks Pauline and the baby out into the perpetually stormy Canadian night.
Nice woman. The movie has its problems. Lew Cody is a stiff, who can't raise much in the way of looking as miserable as his character is supposed to be, although he looks a bit glum. That doesn't matter, because this movie is directed by Maurice Tourneur, that most painterly of directors. Every frame in the first half looks like a Pre-Raphaelite portrait, with Tourneur using every trick in the book (long chapters of which he wrote) to vary composition: not only set design and props, but actually changing the shape of the frame; for a time the frame is shaped like a Gothic arch.
It's astonishingly lovely, and the amber tint on the copy I saw makes me wish Tourneur had had opportunity to work in Technicolor, perhaps with that most painterly of cinematographers, Jack Cardiff. What a team they would have made! Alas, it was never to be; after the Second World War, Tourneur made only two movies. Although he lived to be 85, dying in 1961, an automobile accident in 1949 ended his film career.
