Gallant Lady

Ann Harding watches her aviator fiancee crash on takeoff, leaving her pregnant and alone. She wanders in a daze and is almost arrested, but Clive Brook, freshly released form prison for euthanizing a patient -- he's a doctor -- rescues her, and arranges for some friends of his to adopt the baby. Then he disappears while she works with antiques dealer Janet Beecher, with Brook occasionally dropping in to adore her and then get drunk. On a buying trip to Italy, she meets Count Tullio Carminati, who adores her. Then she runs into her son, played variously by Scotty Beckett and Dickie Moore -- my, how they grow! Now her birth son is fathered by an adoring Otto Kruger, who has a witch of a fiancee -- his wife having died -- in Betty Lawford. So Miss Harding decides to make Kruger adore her and marry her so she can be the mother to her own child, and Brook can go and get drunk in peace.

Miss Harding pulls off this piffle in her usual graceful way, although it's hard to believe she didn't wince occasionally at this script. So does everyone do a fine job of acting under the direction of Gregory La Cava as Miss Harding goes through enough changes of emotions that I'm surprised she doesn't have whiplash. She's enchanting when her character is happy and fulfilled in Italy, with Carminati singing at her from Italy to Paris, to shipboard back to the US. Likewise, it's nice to see Otto Kruger playing a nice guy. It's the didoes the script cuts to make sure that there's another twist in the plot that makes it ridiculous.