Yet, throughout, Dunne, perched constantly on the edge of tears, maintains a terrifying chipperness that belies her agony, and Montgomery (who, it turns out, is her seducer’s brother) isn’t just a cheerful, slightly runty playboy but an alcoholic whose air of aimless, effervescent bonhomie conceals a stunted tangle of good intentions and unresolved frustrations.Īnd through it all, there’s plenty of sad-eyed humor the bullfrog-voiced Eugene Pallette plays a valet with his usual bumptiousness but laces it with a surprising worldly causticity a Broadway impresario (Walter Catlett) gives a girl a break with a peculiar but aggressively condescending decency and La Cava keeps the action balanced delicately between the terrifyingly intense melodrama of the situations and the characters’ game face of breezy humor. With its urban sophisticates and strivers and its high-society gloss getting scuffed by heels high and low, the movie is the closest cinematic equivalent I’ve seen to the novels of Dawn Powell, in which brittle, brazen wit conceals desperate vulnerability and alcohol doesn’t reveal truths as much as it helps to obliterate the consciousness of those who know them all too keenly. She loves him yet when they reach New York, he gives her the brush-off, and her whole new life in the big city is darkened by her unrequited longing and her self-contempt. Following an amazingly long and nuanced scene of seduction in a compartment, one that shows Nancy to be a sharp-witted verbal jouster whose intelligence is, however, untempered by emotional experience-and that La Cava films with quietly incisive, bitingly ironic angles (notably one in which a strip of mirror between window panes catches precisely that self-image that Nancy can’t catch of herself)-Nancy yields to him, and, it’s suggested, sleeps with him. Its audacity comes through early on, when, on the long train ride that takes the woman, Nancy Andrews, to New York, she meets a suave fellow traveller (Preston Foster) who pursues her to win a bet with his buddy. That’s not the case here: “Unfinished Business”-in which Dunne plays an Ohio woman, nearing unhappy spinsterhood, who takes off for New York to pursue a career as an opera singer, and Montgomery portrays the frivolous and dissolute heir whom she marries as a bitter consolation prize-is a minor masterwork of performance, direction, and screenwriting.
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