Wayward

Old-money Richard Arlen and showgirl Nancy Carroll fall in love and get married. When he takes her home to meet the family, new mother-in-law Pauline Frederick is stuffy and disapproving. Amidst meeting a plethora of elderly relations, Miss Frederick tries to buy off Miss Carroll. She is not for sale, and Mr. Arlen and she set up in a small cottage, whence he goes to work as a manual laborer. After a few years, after a quarrel about money and the baby, she tries to get a job. She's not successful, but coming home, she runs into family connection John Litel, who has been decent to her. In the meantime, the neighborhood girl who has been watching the baby does something wrong, and grandma is called in. By the end of the evening, Arlen and their daughter are installed in Miss Fredericks' mansion and Miss Carroll is thrown out.

It's a common story of the era, about the snobbish rich, but it has a little more under the direction of Edward Sloman: the evils of selfish love. Miss Carroll suffers adorably from the get-go, Miss Frederick is marvelous as the evil mother-in-law, and Mr. Arlen is pretty much the stiff nullity they fight over. Dorothy Stickney has a fine small but key part as the housemaid who cares about Mr. Arlen, accepts Miss Carroll at face value, but is too timid to face up to her employer. It's a welcome relief from the sassy domestic so often seen in movies of this era.

Although Miss Stickney appeared in only 15 movies, she had a long life, dying in 1998 at age 101. A sturdy and steady actress, her best-remembered role was as the Queen in the original Julie Andrews broadcast of the Rodgers-Hammerstein CINDERELLA in 1957.