User Reviews

The time: 1905. The place: a small town near Chicago. Barbara Stanwyck plays Avis, a woman who comes from a middle-class family, but is now on the verge of getting very rich: she has orchestrated a real estate deal that will leave her with 400 thousand dollars in profit, and she will let no one get in her way, even if it means lying to or blackmailing her own brothers. But the arrival in town of a man she loved many years ago, but who ran out on her to marry another woman, complicates matters. Stanwyck is aces in this efficiently directed (by the famous Jacques Tourneur) tale, stepping over everyone and everything, until she develops a conscience. And that may be the problem here: the ending is a little too rushed and moralistic. **1/2 out of 4.

You know, when Barbara Stanwyck is on the screen that she is going to be completely in command if she's a woman of power, she's not only in command. She's in charge. Of course, it's with a bit of deception as an act of fraud that makes it appear that her late father left her in charge, not her weaker brothers (John McGiver and Robert Emhardt), and her scheme could change the face of their town in its favor.

What is interesting about this period melodrama is the fact that Stanwyck who looks younger than the actors playing her brothers was actually nearly a decade older. Kent Smith plays the man that Barbara wants, and in movies, what Barbara wants, she gets, no matter who gets shafted. Jason Robards Sr. Plays Smith's father, and the always delightful Almira Sessions is Stanwyck's maid. Even in just 25 minutes, this episode is plenty detailed and practically perfect.