The story of mother love sacrificed to societal demands, the silent Stella Dallas had audiences weeping, owing to Belle Bennett's moving performance. The badly dressed but well-intentioned Stella can never aspire to the pretensions of her husband (Ronald Colman), and finally gives up her daughter to a more upwardly mobile future. The image of the mother-as-stranger, standing in the rain looking in on her daughter's wedding, has to be a kind of American soap gothic. But Frances Marion and master Hollywood craftsman Henry King took a sentimental novel and made it into a realistic, perceptive film: "It is the picture's triumph that we believe the characters while repudiating the illogic of their story. (The) camera looks directly on all the minute behaviorisms that epitomize 'the motions of the spirit'.... This is a film which seems to be consciously composed of such moments, almost tactile in its direct appeal, using sense-memories and associations to pull us into the action." (Richard Griffith, MOMA)