The story of mother love sacrificed to societal demands, the original, silent Stella Dallas (it was remade in 1937 with Barbara Stanwyck) had audiences weeping in 1925, owing in part to Belle Bennett's convincing performance as Stella, and Ronald Colman's less likeable characterization of Stella's husband Stephen, who marries her “beneath his station” and then leaves her with a daughter whom she eventually delivers to an upward mobility to which she herself can never aspire. Comparing director Henry King's sensibilities to Proust, Richard Griffith (Museum of Modern Art) describes how the master Hollywood craftsman took a sentimental story and made it into a realistic, perceptive film:
“Such an achievement would be difficult today. Dialogue is as often the mask of character as its revelation. But here the silent 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.” (JB)