(4 of 4)
Faithful Heart (Helber). Practically without direction, able husband & wife Herbert Marshall and Edna Best walk desultorily through this British film whose U.S. version has U.S. voices dubbed into the print for some of the minor characters. In a Southampton pub in 1898 a British merchant marine officer (Marshall) seduces a barmaid (Edna Best). Twenty years later he is a post-War Army officer with a rich fiancee and a future when his bastard daughter shows up, a smug young governess (Edna Best). The fiancee pretends to like his daughter but does not discourage her from running away when she decides she is not wanted in her father's home. When Marshall moves to follow her the fiancee poses the essential issue to him: to choose between his 22-year-dead mistress and herself. Thus rationally posed, the problem yields an irrational solution and Marshall pledges allegiance to his dead mistress, abandons his fiancee, embarks on a spiritually incestuous cruise with his daughter.
The direction is so bad that Mr. & Mrs. Marshall, as father and daughter, seem to grin self-consciously at one another. The hero is named Waverly Ango, the heroine Blackie, the fiancee Diana, other characters Miss Gatterscombe and Sir Gilbert Oughterson.
After finishing Faithful Heart on a comparatively small salary, Husband Marshall, now a bigger box-office name than his wife, was scheduled to do another English picture with Jeanette MacDonald. Script difficulty delayed the start until his Paramount contract called him back to Hollywood whence he is setting out this week for Honolulu to do a shipwreck cinema called Four Frightened People, with Claudette Colbert.
With him goes his wife, leaving their three-month-old daughter with Grandmother Best in London. Marshall, now 43, and Edna Best Beard Marshall, now 33, had another wife and husband when they first met several years after the War, she with twin sons, he rickety from War wounds. Before the War, he had failed as an articled clerk, done fairly as a London actor. After the War, both succeeded slowly on the stage as drawing-room characters, he despite a marked limp. After their marriage in 1928 their luck brightened rapidly. Hollywood discovered them two years ago. Marshall's best known pictures were Trouble in Paradise, Blonde Venus, Evenings for Sale.