The rarely seen third panel of King Vidor's1933-35 Back-to-the-Land triptych (after The Stranger's Return and Our Daily Bread) twists the themeinto an artist's metaphor. Gary Cooper is a hard-drinking Manhattan novelist of fading reputation whoretreats to the ancestral farmland in Connecticut to recover from his publisher's rejection of his latestbook. (Vidor modeled Cooper's character and acting style on his sometime friend F. Scott Fitzgerald,figuring he was fair game after Fitzgerald's 1932 story "Crazy Sunday," which had used Vidor as a modelfor the pathologically unfaithful Hollywood husband.) The wildly inappropriate title is vestige of producerSamuel Goldwyn's bizarre notion of using this story to top the success of It Happened One Night. Asproduced however, it's a tale of one WASP's encounter with an Eastern European immigrant group, thePolish farming community-particularly one beauty (Anna Sten)-that gives Cooper's novelist newinspiration. Goldwyn's goal of promoting Sten as "the next Garbo" set her up for ridicule, but this film founda role touchingly ideal for her limited talents. If The Wedding Night is minor Vidor, like Street Scene itengages issues of cultural assimilation for which one can search in vain elsewhere in Hollywood. ScottSimmon