Lady of Secrets

Ruth Chatterton has been agoraphobic for twenty years. However, when she meets Otto Kruger in the park, and he mistakes her for a wise woman of experience, he confesses that he's having second thoughts about his proposal to Marian Marsh. He loves her, he says, but she is so young, he's worried she's considering his proposal because she's dazzled. It's only the next day, when Miss Marsh introduces Kruger to her family, that he discovers Miss Chatterton's first secret. She's Miss Marsh's much older sister. Other secrets will follow.

After two years off the screen, Miss Chatterton was making a determined comeback in older roles, and she gives a typically sterling performance -- although a flashback scene to her own youth is played very well, she cannot erase twenty years from her age. Likewise, Mr. Kruger is at his most charming, a charm that he would later use effectively playing villains. Lionel Atwill, as the self-involved, heavy-handed father of the two women is despicable..... but that looks like what the role calls for.

It's the sort of idiot-plotted soap opera in which the conflict exists because no one ever says the truth to the person who needs to hear it. It's not as bad as most of them, because the reasons, for once, make sense in the society in which movie is set. Nonetheless, it would not greatly interest me, were it not for the superb performance of Ruth Chatterton.