East of Fifth Avenue

There was very little info available on this film, and I had never heard of it, but found it very watchable, packed with interwoven stories of various boarders in a rooming house... and a bit of a tear jerker. Despite billing, Dorothy Tree is the 'star', a chorus line dancer with a problem..she's pregnant and unmarried..and considering the time of the film, this is all very open (although the 'p' word isn't spoken). She hopes upon his return, the fellow she loves, Wallace Ford, will marry her, but when he brings home a frilly southern belle wife, Tree is crushed. Harry Holman plays a con-man, who promises Lucien Littlefield hair growth and his landlady, Maude Eburne, a turtle that doubles in size every week (if fed a secret diet he will give her if she forgets his back rent). The hair falls out, the turtle does grow (it doesn't really, this is kind of funny), and Ford's bride becomes smitten by a would-be overly dramatic novelist, Walter Byron.

The pace is quick, and there isn't a wasted scene, but at the heart of the multiple individual melodramas is the 'calm' of an elderly couple-- Walter Connolly and Louise Carter..just weeks from their 50th anniversary, and dreaming of returning to England one more time to a home they finally own. The other boarders are like children they never had, and they see and accept all their shortcomings. The ending is bittersweet, hard lessons are learned, and through death comes new understandings.

At a boarding house run by Maude Eburne, there's a lot of drama and comedy going on among the residents and staff. Most of the movie, however, centers around the triangle of gambler Wallace Ford, whose new wife, Mary Carlisle, wants him to get into a real business; and chorus line gypsy Dorothy Tree, his old girl friend, who's a few months along. Guess who the father is.

Given the year and the pretty good cast that Columbia could assemble for its programmers, there's a tendency to compare this to GRAND HOTEL. Perhaps that's what Columbia had in mind; after all, Keaton claimed he had pitched GRAND MILLS HOTEL, an all-star burlesque about a notorious Bowery flophouse, to Thalberg. If you look at it that way, it looks shoddy and ridiculous. If you stop and consider that the problems of the rich and famous are different than ours because they have money, and the problems of people without money might be just as important.... well, it's a strange and revolutionary idea to some, but it might have some truth in it.

It's too bad that director Albert Rogell is just competent, and has a typical Columbia budget. Still, DP Benjamin Kline offers some lovely two-shots of Mr. Ford and Miss Tree.