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When Delia Lovell (Miriam Hopkins) tires of waiting for dashing Clem Spender (George Brent) and goes to the altar with a member of the stuffy but dependable Ralston family, she sends Cousin Charlotte (Bette Davis) to break the news to Clem. Delia, who does not suspect that Charlotte also loves Clem, is enraged to discover it, vindictively prevents Charlotte and Clem's baby from seeking refuge in the Ralston clan after Clem is killed in the Civil War. Instead Delia takes in Charlotte and her baby herself, lavishes affection on Clem's child, while Charlotte grows through the years into an embittered, bombazined old maid. Because Delia can do everything, Charlotte nothing, for her, Daughter Tina's unconscious cruelty to her real mother makes the old maid's refuge a house of hate so terrible that Delia, not a bad sort under her selfishness, finally tries to tear it down.
Though the musty setting of The Old Maid is enough to make anyone susceptible to historical hay fever squirm, few will be unimpressed by the skill with which Director Edmund Goulding manages his spirited costars. Instead of trying to divide the fat bits between them, he so deals out their histrionic diet that they banquet as did Jack Sprat and his wife, cooperatively.
When Tomorrow Comes (Universal) is like a salty story washed out before the end. Its first sequences show Helen Smith (Irene Dunne) helping to organize a strike among her fellow waitresses at Karb's Restaurant, making a stump speech on the sisterhood of the working class. But "Solidarity Forever" has scarcely died on Helen's lips and she has yet to join the picket line when she meets a French concert pianist named Philip André Pierre Chegal (Charles Boyer). Next thing she and the audience know, they have been whisked off for a hurricane-tossed Long Island weekend, bogged in a set of problems which cinemaddicts will not find notable for novelty.
Hollywood ribbers had great fun with the title When Tomorrow Comes. Produced and directed by deliberate oldtimer John M. Stahl (Back Street, Imitation of Life), whose method is to take scenes over & over until they suit him, the picture made so much trouble that thin Producer Stahl lost 19 lbs. The circumstance that his picture (which daringly speaks the dread initials C. I. 0. and A. F. of L.) came pat on the cinema industry's own realistic labor crisis last week was not calculated to make him gain it back.
*There was a silent Wizard of Oz produced by Chadwick Pictures in 1925.