The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934)

Directed by Sidney Franklin. Starring Norma Shearer, Charles Laughton, Fredric March, Maureen O’Sullivan, Vernon Downing, Marion Clayton, Katharine Alexander, Una O’Connor, Ralph Forbes, Ian Wolfe.

Shearer plays Victorian-era poet Elizabeth Barrett, a sickly young woman who finds herself feeling rejuvenated by the arrival of fellow wordsmith Robert Browning (March). But her stern and tyrannical father (Laughton) doesn’t cotton to atypical methods for improving her health and forbids his children from marrying. Adequate if only occasionally involving drama resembles a “dignified soaper”; talky and deficiently passionate, but worth sticking through to the end. Shearer is sympathetic but March’s talents are put to poor use as a shameless romantic, while Clayton’s squeaky-voiced simpleton cousin with a speech impediment is weally, weally iwwitating; as for Laughton, he can only do so much with a rather one-note martinet role when the incest angle is stifled, but he still shows relish barking over-the-top lines like: “I’ll have her dog…her dog must be destroyed at once!” Adapted from Rudolf Besier’s stage play. A scene-for-scene remake was helmed by Franklin in 1957.

63/100