*** Possible Spoilers*** When Adam needs a new governess for his four sons, he and his wife hire a French governess to take care of them. The wife soon dies and over the years she becomes the mainstay of the home, in spite of a stock market crash, World War I and the straying wife of one of the boys. A good effort by all, including a young and manipulative Susan Hayward. Given the era, some of the content was surprising and the story was by no means a conventional epic.
A good classic family drama...
Emilie (Ingrid Bergman), a french governess, is hired by wealthy Adam Stoppard (Warner Baxter) and his wife Molly to look after their four sons. Following the untimely death of their mother, the boys grow to depend on Emilie more.
When the boys are older they join the army. When they return home one of them brings home a beautiful wife Hester (Susan Hayward). It soon becomes clear that Hester is trouble. She's a heartless gold-digger that nearly splits the family apart. Can Emilie hold the family together with Hester around causing trouble?
Over the years Emilie's feelings for Adam grow deeper and she falls in love with him. Even the though the boys are now men at this point, Adam insists that she come and live with them again as part of the family....
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I don't understand why this film doesn't get better ratings than it does. Everyone seems to think it an overly saccharine piece of cinema. Personally, I find it very nice - tasteful, romantic, and not too heavy. Sure, maybe it was weird to have Emilie come back after the boys were grown up. But if I remember correctly, they wanted her to come back and she had promised she would. Anything wrong with keeping a promise?
That aside... The only complaints that I have is that the end IS a bit abrupt - suddenly everything is cleared up, Adam proposes and before they even kiss the words "The End" appear. And Susan Hayward's character is really annoying. Hester. Who in their right mind would name their girl Hester? Anyway. Helen Westley is a minor character here, Aunt Phillipa. June Lockhart is the neighbour girl who falls in love with Adam's youngest son. I liked her better as the Praslin daughter in All This and Heaven Too, but she fit the part finely here all the same.
My favourite scene is the one when Emilie decides that Hester is going to leave. Very rarely do you ever get to see sweet, pretty Ingrid taking command like she does in that scene.
My recommendation is to give this movie a chance at least and make a rational judgement about it before believing that it's only second-rate sugar.
George Cukor helped transform a moody Victorian stage melodrama (previously filmed in Britain in 1939) into a gothic Hollywood romantic thriller. Ingrid Bergman stars as a meek, uncertain heiress courted and married in a whirlwind romance by the debonair Charles Boyer, but when they move back into her childhood home she begins losing her grip on reality and becomes convinced that her husband is trying to drive her insane. Joseph Cotten, rather stiff and colorless next to the anguished Bergman and charming and lively Boyer, is the heroic Scotland Yard detective who becomes enamored of the skittish woman who is slowly succumbing to madness. The grand, glorious sets and elegant photography recall Hitchcock's Rebecca, another lush Hollywood gothic melodrama of a retiring young wife... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Charles Boyer - Ingrid Bergman - Joseph Cotten Director(s): George Cukor DVD Release Date: Released the 03 February 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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This Academy Award winner for Best Picture is a sweeping soap opera about the guests at the Grand Hotel. Several plots intertwine, but mostly it's about Stars! Stars! Stars! Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery, and both Barrymore brothers head up the cast. Garbo is luminous as Grusinskaya, the neurotic and famous-but-slipping dancer and, yes, she "vonts to be alone." John Barrymore is a cat burglar with blue blood and a heart of gold, and Lionel Barrymore happily caroms off him as Mr. Kringelein, a dying man who wants to live out the time he has left with the rich. Joan Crawford is perhaps the biggest surprise of the movie: as Flaemmchen, a young career girl trying to decide between secretary and tart, she is uncharacteristically funny, vivacious, and downright bubbly. Along the way... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Greta Garbo - John Barrymore - Joan Crawford Director(s): Edmund Goulding DVD Release Date: Released the 03 February 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) Fredric March won an Oscar® for playing the protagonist (and antagonist) of Robert Louis Stevenson's story. Dr. Henry Jekyll is an honorable man of science, albeit frustrated at the enforced celibacy of a delayed wedding date. Hyde is the fearsome creature he turns into after drinking a potion, and Hyde's appetites (mostly expressed with Miriam Hopkins's Cockney dance-hall wench) are decidedly unrestrained. March's performance is pretty theatrical, but it's fun to watch; his Hyde twitches and squawks and lopes around like an ape in a tuxedo. Rouben Mamoulian's direction has plenty of the brio of early-thirties Hollywood, and the transformations from Jekyll to Hyde are ingenious for the time. This film followed Dracula and... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Fredric March - Miriam Hopkins Director(s): Rouben Mamoulian DVD Release Date: Released the 06 January 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Winner of three Academy Awards including Best Picture, The Great Ziegfeld stars William Powell in a biopic "suggested by romances and incidents in the life of America's greatest showman, Florenz Ziegfeld Jr." With admirable accuracy, the film follows Ziegfeld's career from small-time sideshow barker to creator of the famous Ziegfeld Follies, the collection of singing, dancing, and comedy vaudeville acts that launched the careers of such luminaries as Fanny Brice, Ray Bolger, and Harriet Hoctor, all of whom play themselves in the film. In the title role, Powell offers a believable combination of ambition and hucksterism, and his Thin Man costar Myrna Loy makes a late appearance as his second wife, but it's large-eyed Luise Rainer who has the showier role (and won an... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): William Powell - Myrna Loy - Luise Rainer Director(s): Robert Z. Leonard DVD Release Date: Released the 03 February 2004 Usually ships within 24 hours
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