User Reviews

This is a very good film, despite being entirely forgotten and never before reviewed for IMDb. It has the advantage of having been directed by Lewis Milestone. The leading lady in the film, Alyce, is played by the 19 year-old French actress Olympe Bradna. She was born in Paris into a theatrical and circus family, and was born backstage between acts in Paris in the famous 19th century home of vaudeville, the Olympia Theatre, after which she was named! It is a wonderful theatre and I was there in late January before the virus lockdown for a film awards ceremony. The story of this film is both sad and happy, hence I described it as 'bittersweet'. It is from an origin al screenplay by the famous screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart. The main character, Dan O'Farrell, played with great emotion by Pat O'Brien, is a playwright and actor. But he has a serious drink problem. A fellow actor excellently played by Roland Young has a similar drink problem. Not long before the performance of his new play LAUGHTER (in which he plays a clown), O'Brien and Young (who is also in the play, playing a circus ringmaster) decide to have a drink. Well we know what having a drink means if you're alcoholic. They both get stinking drunk but go onstage anyway and ruin the show (in which O'Brien's wife was the female lead). The curtain is forced to go down, the audience is in uproar, and the show closes. O'Brien's career is ruined. His wife leaves him forever and disappears. Much of the action of the film takes place in the old Lambs Club on West 44th Street. It was a private men-only club for Broadway show people. O'Farrell is held together by his chums there year after year, and twenty years pass with him wasting away. Then suddenly he receives a letter from the mother superior of a convent school in Quebec informing him that he has a daughter who has just come of age. Her mother, named Alyce, died in childbirth only a few months after leaving O'Brien, and the daughter is also named Alyce. The instructions were that she was not to be told the name of her father until she came of age. She now wants to come to New York to meet him. And so she does, and is played by the Olympe Bradna mentioned earlier. Her French accent is justified by her having been brought up in French Canada, and she is bilingual. O'Brien is so ashamed of his past behaviour that he is reluctant to meet her, and tries to get his friend Young to pretend to be him, and encourage her to follow her plan to fly to Paris shortly afterwards where she intends to study art. But things work out so that father and daughter become attached to one another despite everything, and she stays. She takes an interest in her father's old play and wants to revive it, if a play that never completed its first performance can be considered to be 'revived'. She ends up being cast in her mother's role, and O'Brien plays his original character. The show is a tremendous hit. I cannot reveal more about the story or the ending, but this is a worthy melodrama and one well worth seeing, if you can get a copy. I saw it on a decades-old video. Good luck finding a copy.