Laura Hope Crews is a revelation here. I don't think I've seen another film in which she has had the lead. Technically, Irene Dunne and Joel McCrea are top billed, but Crews is actually the whole show.
David Phelps (Joel McCrea) has married research biologist Christina (Irene Dunne) a few months before, and they decide to pay a visit to David's mother. David's younger brother Robert (Eric Linden) is there with his fiancee Hester (Frances Dee). Crews plays the boys' mother, and she is the clingiest of moms and not the least bit subtle. Christina catches on to what she is instantly, but her sons, probably dulled to her screeching from being exposed to a lifetime of it, are blind to her deception. She not too subtly tries to extricate both sons from their relationships, in spite of the fact that Davod is married AND his wife is expecting a baby.
Ultimately, this film goes to a rather precode place when Mrs. Phelps admits that her love for her sons has always made up for the romance she never got from their father, who was much older than she. Yikes! There is another precode issue when it is insinuated that the younger brother might actually be gay because of all of this maternal hovering when he announces he is going to study interior decorating and his older brother makes a snide remark. It's an archaic stereotype, but still it wouldn't probably have been in a film made just a couple of years later. This rather short film gets very melodramatic at times, but is helped along with Dunne's more subtle performance.
I'd recommend it just to get a big dose of Crews, who is mainly remembered for supporting roles. Joel McCrea and Frances Dee, married for 57 years until McCrea's death, met while working on this, although they hardly have anything to say to each other within the film itself.
David Phelps (Joel McCrea) has married research biologist Christina (Irene Dunne) a few months before, and they decide to pay a visit to David's mother. David's younger brother Robert (Eric Linden) is there with his fiancee Hester (Frances Dee). Crews plays the boys' mother, and she is the clingiest of moms and not the least bit subtle. Christina catches on to what she is instantly, but her sons, probably dulled to her screeching from being exposed to a lifetime of it, are blind to her deception. She not too subtly tries to extricate both sons from their relationships, in spite of the fact that Davod is married AND his wife is expecting a baby.
Ultimately, this film goes to a rather precode place when Mrs. Phelps admits that her love for her sons has always made up for the romance she never got from their father, who was much older than she. Yikes! There is another precode issue when it is insinuated that the younger brother might actually be gay because of all of this maternal hovering when he announces he is going to study interior decorating and his older brother makes a snide remark. It's an archaic stereotype, but still it wouldn't probably have been in a film made just a couple of years later. This rather short film gets very melodramatic at times, but is helped along with Dunne's more subtle performance.
I'd recommend it just to get a big dose of Crews, who is mainly remembered for supporting roles. Joel McCrea and Frances Dee, married for 57 years until McCrea's death, met while working on this, although they hardly have anything to say to each other within the film itself.