Nova Pilbeam gives a fine first screen performance in Berthold Viertel's movie. She is the witness to the breakup of her parents, Matheson Lang and and Lydia Sherwood. Lang is a loving father, distracted by business, and Miss Sherwood has been engaging in an affair with actor Arthur Margetson. Everyone tries to pretend that nothing is happening, but children are always attentive to what people around them do. Unable to cope, she turns peculiar.
the script by Christopher Isherwood -- it's his first screenplay -- treads a careful path between the reality of the situation and what the censors would permit. Certainly, it is more honest than anything Hollywood might have tried to produce under the newly enforced Production Code, If, in the face of more open and honest films like KRAMER VS. KRAMER, it comes off as coy and with a mildly disturbing ending, well, a lot changed in terms of what was acceptable in movies in the forty-five years that separate the two films. For 1934, it is a fine film, even if its luster has dimmed.
