VANESSA: HER LOVE STORY (1935)

This was the last movie Helen Hayes made for almost 20 years; I don't know this one drove her into screen retirement, but it is no classic. It's an episodic melodrama with little to distinguish it from any other run-of-the-mill melodrama of its day. Hayes is Vanessa, daughter of Lewis Stone and granddaughter of May Robson (who is turning 100 as the film begin). Hayes is in love with a cousin, the dashing and slightly roguish Robert Montgomery, and he with her. However, Otto Kruger is also in love with Hayes; he's the opposite of dashing (and a little neurotic), but he's also a bit more respectable than Montgomery. Hayes and Montgomery are soon to be married when a tragic fire sweeps through her family house and claims her father's life. Montgomery saves her, but she thinks he deliberately didn't save her father--we know what she doesn't, that Stone was dead of a heart attack by the time Montgomery got to him. She tells him off and he goes on a bender, winding up married to a lusty barmaid. Over time, Hayes sees the error of her ways but gives in and marries Kruger, who is mentally ill (though that information is kept from Hayes--by this time, I was beginning to think they all lived in Pine Valley!). Montgomery becomes free, but by that time, Kruger has gone insane and she feels she cannot leave him. Despite being made during the Production Code era, the impression is definitely given that Hayes and Montgomery are rather openly carrying on an affair. In an abrupt ending, Kruger dies and Our Lovers can make it legal. There are lots of short scenes, almost tableaux, and after the first 20 minutes or so, the dramatic tension slackens. Also in the cast are Henry Stephenson, Donald Crisp, and Jessie Ralph. Produced by David Selznick and not his finest hour, although a few elements here would make their way into GONE WITH THE WIND (ill-starred lovers, dying soldiers, and a scene of two people standing silhouetted in the distance under a huge tree--remember Scarlett and her father early in the movie?).