THE TRUTH ABOUT YOUTH (1930)

This early talkie will mostly appeal to fans of Loretta Young and Myrna Loy. It's certainly watchable, and it's sort of fun to see the plot careen back and forth between melodrama shaded with humor and coming of age story, with some hints of almost incestuous attraction in a May-December romance. Conway Tearle plays a middle-aged bachelor who has, with the help of two other older bachelors, raised the son of a friend (who died when the boy was only 6). Now the boy, affectionately nicknamed The Imp (David Manners) is turning 21 and he's engaged to be married to Loretta Young, daughter of Tearle's housekeeper. The Imp is a callow youth (after all, he's played by David Manners) and he skips a carefully planned birthday dinner to spend the night carousing with Kara, a sexy, golddigging nightclub singer (Myrna Loy). She thinks the boy has a big inheritance and so agrees to marry him when he asks her, but what she doesn't know is that Manners has very little money at all. Young finds a love letter from Loy to Manners, but Tearle covers up for Manners by saying it was written to him (they both have the same first name). This ploy, however, upsets Young even more--it turns out that she has been nursing a crush on the older man for some time. Tearle goes though an elaborate charade to keep the truth from Young, not realizing all the time that Young is miserable. Everything works out in the end for most of the characters: Young winds up with Tearle; Loy marries a rich daddy from Paris; Manners has no one, but has grown up from the experience.

It's a 1930 movie, so it's a little stiff and stagy, in production and acting. Loy is wonderful, like a breath of fresh air whenever she's around, glittery and sexy and dangerous. Manners is his usual rather awkward self (when he's staring with lust at Loy, he looks rather like Harpo Marx during his drunk scene in THE COCOANUTS) but he has the leading man looks needed for the part. Young is not as good as she would be in later movies; both she and Tearle are rather stiff. It could be intentional because both characters have been hiding emotional secrets from each other and everyone else, but I think that's a generous theory. The feelings of the 18-year-old Young for the 50's-ish Tearle and vice versa are fairly obvious from the beginning (and that Young lives in the house--and I think also works for Tearle--is what makes it feel almost like incest), but some more background of the characters would be helpful. All the exposition is crammed into a long dialogue scene in the first ten minutes of the movie. I would particularly recommend this to Loy fans--it's always fun seeing her as a kind of femme fatale (as she was in several of her early films) and contrasting that image with her good-girl/wifely image later in her career. [TCM]