Admirable film.

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

In London, American chorus girl Mae Clarke (as Myra Deauville) enjoys a short career on stage. The Great War (aka World War I) arrives and times get tough for Ms. Clarke. Unemployed but attractive, she drifts into prostitution. After becoming a regular streetwalker, Clarke goes out to score a trick on "Waterloo Bridge" and meets naive 19-year-old Royal Canadian soldier Douglass Montgomery (as Roy Cronin). He and Clarke help and old woman pick up her scattered vegetables, during an air raid. Thinking Clarke is a proper young woman, Mr. Montgomery walks her home. Clarke and Montgomery are mutually attracted, but she worries about her sordid occupation..."Waterloo Bridge" featured a very familiar theme, for the time. Again, the "fallen women" suffers through a doomed romance. This character type was played by most of the era's big-name actresses, and Mae Clarke does an excellent, herein...Prostitutes, historical figures and alcoholics were the parts to play if you wanted to be an actress of note. Of course, the sexually active unmarried woman must be punished in the end. Unlike several of her street-walking contemporaries, Clarke did not reach super-stardom. Montgomery asserts himself well. As was common during the transition to sound, he is made to wear too much eye make-up. Of the other players, landlady Ethel Griffies gets the third best part. She and Rita Carlyle (the old woman with potatoes) were still around for the next "Waterloo Bridge" (1940). Although it wasn't so at the time, the biggest name in the cast is Bette Davis (as Janet), playing Montgomery's socialite sister.******* Waterloo Bridge (9/4/31) James Whale ~ Mae Clarke, Douglass Montgomery, Ethel Griffies, Bette Davis

This takes place during WW1. Soldier Roy (Kent Douglass) meets and falls in love with Myra (Mae Clarke). She tells him she's a chorus girl but she's actually a prostitute. She falls in love with him too but is racked with guilt over lying to him. It all leads to a predictable (but moving) tragic ending.Excellent drama based on a play. It was remade in 1940 but that version was toned down to appease the Production Code. This version is uncut and (for its time) pretty raw. It was made with top production values and beautifully directed by James Whale. Douglass is very good as Roy (if a little overly naive) but Clarke is excellent as Myra. Her pain and agony comes through in every scene. More surprising is that some members of Roy's family figures out what she does--and could care less. The ending is somewhat predictable but damned if it didn't have me crying. Also is has a young Bette Davis in a supporting role! Recommended.

Mae Clark plays a prostitute who meets up with a young, earnest soldier during World War I. He's from a well-to-do family, and she knows they could never work as a couple, even though she wants to let herself love him. He seems not to care about their differences, even when he finds out what she does for a living. It all ends tragically and abruptly, but makes for some very compelling melodrama in the meantime.The pre-Code frankness and grit do a lot to keep the maudlin sentimentality at bay in this story that could come across as a second-rate soap opera. If this had been made ten years later (which it was, in a version starring Vivien Leigh and which I have not seen), it would have been drenched in a syrupy score that would have given us non-stop cues about what emotions we were supposed to be feeling at every turn. But there's a matter-of-factness about this film that's as surprising as any of the actual content. I've found that frequently with these pre-Code films, what's shocking about them is not the racy material, but rather the tone pervading them.Clark gives a very good performance, but I was actually more impressed with Kent Douglass as the young soldier. He has a natural acting style that seems ahead of its time compared to his contemporaries. And Bette Davis has a small role as the soldier's sister, and proves why she became one of the biggest stars of all time. Every time she's on screen, and even in a few instances when you can't see her but can only hear her, she completely dominates the film.And maybe this makes me sound supremely stupid, but I didn't know London dealt with a blitz during WWI as well.Grade: A-

James Whale (1889-1957), the once very famous director of most excellent horror pictures such as the original "Frankenstein" (1931), who was later forgotten, after Hollywood forced him, in 1941, to an early retirement due to, amongst other things, non-closeted homosexual liaisons, is recently getting re-detected, having started with the restored edition of Whale's "The Old Dark House" (1932). "Waterloo Bridge" (1931), is his first self-directed feature-long movie. It stands, for all those who know a bit about the difficult life of Whale, closely under the experiences of his early years. The movie has been released for the first time on a film-carrier, having never appeared before on video, due to the self-imposed moral codex of the Hollywood studios and is part of a meritorious series called "Forbidden Hollywood", exclusively never before seen, mostly excellent pictures.Given that "Waterloo Bridge" was made in 1930, compare the acting on the one side with the contemporaneous acting in European movies of the same time - you will find a distance that cannot be bigger, since the over-acting due to the lack of sound which is so characteristic for especially German silent movies, was still sensible for a long time. On the other side, compare the mannerist speaking of the American films noir of the 30ies and 40ies - with both types, "The Waterloo Bridge" has nothing in common. Whale went even so far as to smuggle a few linguistic examples for switching of social codes into the movie - listen carefully the dialogs between the two main actors, the one is a Canadian noble-man turned soldier, the other is a street-walker and former chorus girl. But much more astonishing is not the actual choice of words of different linguistic levels, but the way how extraordinarily open topics are discussed in this movie that would still today be considered improper in many parts of society on both sides of the ocean. Another most interesting sociological feature is that Whale systematically showed the different types of everyday's behavior of a European and a Canadian. The Canadian, very close to the American, is without any reason polite a priori and thus avoiding tough subjects and rather leaves the scene instead of going through to the bloody end. She, the English girl, raises her voice, throws him bucket-wise the stinking truth of her miserable youth in his face - and kind of awakes him in doing so. Compare the scene when Myra admits to her lover's mother that she lives from pick-ups. The mother reacts as if she never had expected such an act of honesty from a girl from her cultural background. What Whale did here is a psycho-gram including not only sociological, but also linguistic behavior.When I was watching this movie, and the movie had nearly reached its end, I said to myself: something is going to happen - otherwise it is not a Whale-movie. And something terrible did happen. Watch this true jewel of highest film work and ask yourself about the function of the bridge.