Delmer Daves specialized in expensive, louche melodramas for Warners, running roughly from "A Summer Place" to "Youngblood Hawke," all with unhappy love affairs, stunning location photography, and swelling Max Steiner scores--usually two or three main themes, actually lasting about sixty seconds but repeated over and over to fill out a two-hour running time. This one has Connie Stevens, post-"Hawaiian Eye," as the poor little rich-girl daughter of Dorothy McGuire (shot in aggressive soft focus) and Lloyd Nolan (given ridiculous Hollywood-notion-of-an-intellectual lines; he doesn't have dialog, he has pronouncements), who falls in love with dull Grant Mitchell on a South American cruise, carries his child, and then falls for soulful wastrel Troy Donahue, whose father ripped off Nolan's mining company and hanged himself in jail, in rich Warner Brothers chiaroscuro, with all that Max Steiner sawing away in the background. Stevens isn't bad, but why she'd entrance so many young available men, also including a pre-game-show Bert Convy as the rich son of Natalie Schaefer and Brian Aherne, isn't clear; her character's really sort of dull and stupid, and you'd never believe that Donahue, as a stable hand who writes Great American Novels on the side, would be captivated by her. Daves indulged in Douglas Sirk scenarios and externals, but lacked his irony and subversive social commentary. So this is straightforward soap, featuring Grandma-posing-as-Mom, attempted suicide, a baby on fire, and lovely views of Monterey, Guatemala, and Chile. As such, it's a fun chick-flick time-waster, and the Steiner themes will remain in your head for days, if only because of repetition.
Review of Susan Slade
