A melodrama that fits in perfectly with its place in the historic time it was set and nowhere else. If a man was walking out with a gal in 1946 immediately after the second world war, he may well have made taking her to this movie a part of his courtship!
Nancy Coleman (looking shockingly like Judy Garland) and Margaret Lindsay play sisters with problems... Renee can't have children and Antoinette inadvertently gets pregnant!
These days it's easy to be confused about why the people in this movie do what they do... but up until the 1970s being a 'child out of wedlock' was not something anyone would willingly own up to and being unwed parents was something approaching a criminal offence!
Anyway, this movie opens up in New Orleans and the Mardi Gras celebrations. The balcony celebrations of the 1940s are nothing like the bawdy carryings on of today! But people still had lots of fun and let their emotions get the better of them... so, Toni meets Dick and they, well, they let their emotions get the better of them... and Toni ends up preggers.
Dick gets called up to fight the good fight and after some miscommunication, he simply disappears from the scene. The cad, right?
Anyway, the baby is born and secretly adopted by Renee in New Orleans and Toni promises to keep the whole thing a secret and scarpers off to a new life in New York.
"There's nothing that we should ever regret in life except not having lived it!
That's Toni's dying father's last piece of good advice to his unhappy daughter. Now she is so consumed with her own mistake that she gets on a train to New Orleans and secretly sees young Billy from a distance in the local park. After a few weeks of stalking her own son, it gets a little bit creepy and at one point Toni even thinks of picking the child up and running off with him.
Dick shows up in New York and visits Renee in her apartment where all the pieces fall into place. The final fifteen minutes are great melodrama and of course everything, thankfully, ties up neatly!
Well, it is what it is but despite the delicate subject matter, it comes across as good drama and is still worth a watch. There is a terrible version of this on YouTube and unfortunately, I don't know of a better one.
As usual, there are plenty of interesting stories attached to the other players in this movie... Louise Curry plays the stunning, nameless girlfriend of Dick early in the movie. After tiring of the acting game in the mid-1950s, she turned her hand to decorating houses and died aged 100!
Fritz Feld provides comedy relief as a wine salesman. If there's a maitre'd, waiter or chef in a movie it's probably this fellow! There are many more...
I found it watchable but it is old, it is dated and the themes that it tackles certainly don't apply these days.
