The Devil's Holiday

Edmund Goulding's morality tale stars Nancy Carroll as a pretty, gold digging manicurist who attracts the wealthy heir to a harvesting machine fortune (Phillips Holmes). After he pursues her energetically, she agrees to marry him, but when he brings her home to his family's country estate, his father (Hobart Bosworth in a plummy performance right out of 19th century melodrama) summons her to his den for a confrontation about her true motives. There, he swiftly draws out the worst in her and offers her $50,000 to end the marriage. Meanwhile, out on the staircase, the young husband falls and injures himself severely during a violent confrontation with his disapproving older brother. Nouveau riche Nancy nevertheless high tails it back to the big city to spend freely and pack for a dream trip to Paris. Trouble is, she slowly realizes she actually loves Holmes, now a semi-invalid. Can she, will she, redeem herself? It doesn't take long to find out in the perfunctorily structured plot resolution. Holmes and Carroll are more convincing here than in another pairing from around the same time ("Stolen Heaven," 1931).