Wow! Such a good movie.

Touches You

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

In New York, the writer Tony Barrett (Gary Cooper) was successful in his first novel. Now he is alcoholic and his two next books were failures. His publisher refuses to publish his last novel and the totally broken Tony is forced to move with his wife Dora (Helen Vinson) to the countryside of Connecticut to his family farmhouse. On the arrival, his neighbors Mr. Jan Novak (Siegfried Rumann) and his daughter Manya (Anna Sten) offer five thousand dollars for his idle lands. Tony accepts the offer and Dora decides to return to New York. Tony stays with his servant Taka and has dinner with the Novak family to close the business. When Taka decides to return to New York, Manya helps Tony with the housekeeping. They become close to each other and soon they fall in love with each other. But Tony is a married man and Manya is engaged to Fredrik Sobieski (Ralph Bellamy) in an arranged marriage. What will happen to their love?"The Wedding Night" is a sad and tragic romance directed by King Vidor, who was a specialist in melodramas. The timeless love story is believable and engaging and has a heartbreaking conclusion. Based on the number of voters (553) and reviews (20), "The Wedding Night" is an unknown romance and the User Rating (6.8) is underrated. My vote is eight.Title (Brazil): "A Noite Nupcial" ("The Wedding Night")

Heavy handed dour drama was the last of the big budget films to try and turn Anna Sten, Goldwyn's Folly, into another Garbo. The mistake of that was the actress while not bad, a little overfond of popping her eyes but otherwise fine, isn't suited to that persona. Had they pursued a lighter image for her which she seems inclined to perhaps her career would have fared better in American films. Poor Ralph Bellamy, usually an enjoyable presence in pictures, is made ridiculous by his silly casting as a Polish peasant. Cooper fares better mostly because an accent is not forced upon him and his star power is able to shine through. The person who comes across best even though her character is not the most pleasant is Helen Vinson as Cooper's estranged wife. It is at times confusing since she and Sten bear a strong resemblance to each other a fact not played up in the movie and so it serves no purpose but to distract the audience.

When a problematic writer (Gary Cooper) moves back to his country home with his very city oriented wife (Helen Vinson), he falls in love with the innocent Polish girl (Anna Sten) who lives next door. But her father has already promised her hands in marriage to another farmer (Ralph Bellamy), and when problems erupt between Cooper and Vinson, he finds himself falling in love with Sten and she longs to get out of this arranged marriage. But an agreement in the old world is an agreement, and any chance of getting what they wish could lead to tragedy.This very sweet and simple tale has all the elements for great drama, but somehow it never really rises to the heights which it is trying to attain. The leads are young and attractive, and the plot moves briskly, but even with excellent production design and direction by the masterful King Vidor, it still lacks that magic that could have made it explode into something special. I think that occurs because there really is no chemistry between Cooper and Sten, and their unsympathetic partners (Vinson and Bellamy) are not really fleshed out as characters. It also gives the impression that poor European immigrants were lead by an uncompassionate papa and a quietly dignified mama who always suffered in silence. In these roles, Sig Ruman and Esther Dale seem more like stereotypes than real people. Walter Brennan adds some zest to a few scenes as another local, but the end result is a drama that seems like something Lillian Gish may have starred in during the silent era.

Yesterday I re-watched "The Wedding Night" (1935), this time with my wife who had never seen it before. For me it was like watching it all over again for the first time. I think that this happens with great pictures, like this one. She also loved the film and I felt so gratified by that, because sadly this type of quiet, sensitive films is not the kind of film which you can watch with anybody and can be fully appreciated as it should be.I'm a fan of "the Gary Cooper" of the late '20s and 1930s, in my opinion some his best films were made around this time, before his definitive screen persona was established, especially in the early thirties. He gives a sensitive, balanced, nuanced, performance in a film that looks like a slice of life. His character is so unarchetypical, so honestly portrayed by him, that you get immersed totally in this beautiful love story. And this is no by chance, because the film was directed by the masterful King Vidor.Praise must also go to the two actresses that vividly portray the two women in Cooper's life: the unjustly forgotten and underrated Russian actress Anna Sten and the equally unfairly forgotten actress Helen Vinson. Miss Vinson portrays without falling in the caricature, a shallow, but at the same time likable society woman, who thinks that life is a never-ending party and does not take marriage as seriously as it should be taken, realizing it too late. Miss Sten plays the naïve but strong-willed Polish woman who reluctantly at first, begins to fall for the writer portrayed by Cooper. The scene in which Cooper reads to her the first chapters of the new (autobiographical) book he is writing, is most telling in this aspect; because Miss Sten does not fall for the dashing, tall, handsome Cooper, but for his character's sensitiveness, feelings and emotions which she apprehends by means of this book in progress.In short, none of the three principals of this story incur in stereotypical portrayals, which helped me to connect with their characters' emotions, with its virtues and flaws.A wonderful experience, which with no doubt I'll repeat in the future, because this film deserves many viewings and is just my kind of film; a simple love story, unpretentiously directed, that does not aim at over sentimentality and does not fall into the maudlin which can ruin a movie, with superb, unaffected performances by the leads.