In telling the story of a Catholic priest sent to a remote mission in China, Stahl is less concerned with religious doctrine, politics, or culture than with the nuances of individual character.
This droll fable of class and authenticity reveals Stahl as a capable director of comedy. In pre–World War I England, celebrated and misanthropic painter Priam Farll (Monty Woolley) takes advantage of a case of mistaken identity to escape an impending knighthood.
In antebellum New Orleans, Irish gambler Stephen Fox (Rex Harrison) wins a plantation and a beautiful, aristocratic wife (Maureen O’Hara), but can he master them?
Stahl adapts Fannie Hurst’s bestselling novel into a surprisingly clear-eyed and devastating story about what happens when a woman has nothing but a man, and not much of him.
Robert Merrick (Robert Taylor) seems to be a magnet for morbid coincidences. First he’s indirectly responsible for a great doctor’s death, then the doctor’s widow (Irene Dunne) is blinded because of him.
The Charles G. Norris book Seed was subtitled A Novel of Birth Control, but this adaptation makes a case for the virtues of motherhood. John Boles plays a would-be writer, Bart, whose ambition has been dampened by domestic life.
“I’ve never met a woman before who could make speeches, call strikes, serve pancakes, and look beautiful all at the same time,” pianist Philip tells waitress Helen.
Flashing back from the 1929 stock market crash to the early days of World War I, Only Yesterday prefigures the plot of Max Ophüls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman.
