(3 of 3)
The film tells of an Irish girl of the 1870's (Greer Garson) who becomes a servant in the home of a mill owner (Donald Crisp) whom her legless, ex-millhand father (Lionel Barrymore) hates. She watches over the mill owner's stuffy, weak or shallow children (Dan Duryea, Marshall Thompson and Marsha Hunt respectively), becomes a bosom friend of his wife (Gladys Cooper), and falls in love with his one worthy son (Gregory Peck). After trying to help settle a labor dispute involving Montague Barrymore and Capulet Crisp, she withdraws to watch her lover endure a loveless marriage (Jessica Tandy). The movie, as usual, provides a happier ending than the book allowed. In spite of dead stretches and hammy streaks, it isn't a bad story; but it is hardly worth two hours' expensively handsome, meticulous telling.
Though he is hampered by more stolid and much more pretentious material, Director Tay Garnett is still clearly the man who gave the melodramas Bataan and The Cross of Lorraine their honest intensity, and Cameraman Joseph Ruttenberg and several players—notably the Misses Cooper, Tandy and Hunt and Messrs. Peck and Crisp—add valuable services of their own. The main reason the picture will do well, though, is that it gives Greer Garson a chance at something new.
Her work is not all satisfactory. On the one hand Miss Garson sometimes depends too heavily on the limited charms of a brogue, a bustle and a charade-like servant's toddle; on the other, as if by weary obligation, she sometimes lets her face become MGM's official Etruscan mask. Between these hazards, however, she walks a wide and pleasant road, with evident delight and considerable power to communicate it. Some of her love scenes, especially, are worthy of a much better film.