The Prodigal

The Prodigal isn't necessarily a bad film, and it is interesting in that it portrays adultery in a non-judgemental light, but it isn't good either. The production values are quite nice, the music is absolutely wonderful, Roland Young is nicely droll and Lawrence Tibbett with his charisma and big voice is a likable lead. However, Esther Ralston shows no chemistry with Tibbett and for me this is the only Lawrence Tibbett film where neither the comedy or romantic elements quite work, the comedy being unfunny excepting Young's drollness and the romance underdeveloped and syrupy. The story is also very creaky, the characters are stock and uninteresting and the film is too short and unevenly paced. I didn't like the representation of the plantation workers either, it was stereotyped and verged on racially offensive. Overall, interesting curiosity but not a treasure. Worth seeing for the music, the subject and Tibbett if not much else. 5/10 Bethany Cox

How much you like this picture depends on how much you like Lawrence Tibbett. He is in almost every scene and the picture is clearly designed for him, and he doesn't disappoint. Tall and handsome and with a great baritone voice, he carries the picture through all of its illogical eccentricities and old-fashioned moral values.

He is the scion of a wealthy southern family who 'hit the road' and became a hobo after becoming disenchanted with the graceful plantation way of life. He returns home after five years to a mixed welcome, from his mother who adores him and his brother who hates him. His brother's wife, played by Esther Ralston, is also in his corner. The story is trifling and dated but I felt Tibbett makes it work, right up to and including the peculiar ending. The plantation workers were stereotyped and this couldn't be made now, but it worked in 1931.

Not sure you will take to it, unless you are a fan of one of the Metropolitan Opera's great voices.

7 stars - Website no longer prints my star rating.

Everyone is so racist in the old days, huh. The American desperation is more conspicuous, though: whatever it takes. Pianists learn to look at the backside of singers and this one is hipping you right now to how this particular singer, Tibbett was a mensch. How many successful musician-actors start a union?

I might be grinch-ish, but I'm never a nitpicker who doesn't know how to watch a movie. (something about not watching too many and especially not listening to too much rock music) This one is loved because of its heart and soul, about rich dudes, professional doctors and what-not, who dress down and get some real folks on them. This was a real-life fad at the time. To make it into another depression era morality tale, apparently it took this dude, this mensch, who would soon head a union. I tell ya, in my own time!

Tibbett, the famous opera singer/movie star who croons like a Negro (baritone verging on bass.. swing lowww..) also heroically saves a woman from a mean guy in this script and we are entertained by some fairly well executed comedy in several appropriate scenes. Perhaps the lack of romantic chemistry adds to the lightness of this plot fodder, as it certainly didn't hurt this film's tongue fitted nicely into cheek a bit. In the long run, this romantic stuff is happily minimal compared to the Presence of the Humanitarian Singer of Po' Folk Songs. What steals the show and makes everybody feel almost as warm as when little Shirley dances with po' folks. This entertainment trick, vamping as moral cause is just as, if not more valid to the overall quality of a light romance film such as this, and not to be missed. If the big chorus finale song seems a wee bit forced, rest assured this doesn't matter because: Just Singing is Better Than Nothing, when you're poor. Maybe you should try it, sometime?

Tramps were popular during the depression era. I always wanted to be Red Skelton, too. I also had a dirt alley on my street where I grew up and we kids had a fort there. Maybe I just need to live in a rural setting. I'll look into it. Meantime there's this flick. Thanks, old Hollywood.

"The Prodigal" appears to be assembled from leftover script ideas from other films. It opens with some pretty good scenes of the lives of tramps in the early Depression years. Soon it focusses on Jeff Farraday, one of the tramps who actually comes from a wealthy Southern plantation family. Jeff has been exiled from the family, served time in jail, and is detested by his brother Rodman and sister Christine. The Farraday family seems to be withstanding the Depression quite well. Jeff returns to the plantation with a couple of other bums, is welcomed by his adoring mother, scorned by his siblings, and falls in love with the charming and perky Antonia, the wife of his brother Rodman. Rodman, of course, is a cruel, bullying stuffed shirt who hates Antonia but won't give her a divorce.

The film veers from melodramatic family conflict to awkward love scenes to thoroughly unfunny comedy to incongruous musical numbers. Jeff is played by opera-singer Lawrence Tibbett who frequently breaks into song. Tibbett can really sing but he can't act, nor can any of the other characters in this mishmash. But then with lines like these, it would be impossible for any actor to seem anything other than ridiculous.

Not to be overlooked are the really horrible portrayals of the blacks on the plantation. Even for the time (when Aunt Jemima type characters are standard), these racist portrayals are extreme. One farmhand is a whining, sniveling wimp; other scenes involving the darkies' BBQ make a viewer want to crawl under the table.

Some wonderful singing by Lawrence Tibbett saves The Prodigal from total oblivion. As it is it's a film not likely to be remade in this day and age or the future because of some really bad portrayals of southern blacks as happy contented darkies. In this film Tibbett plays the title role, a prodigal son returned home to his southern gentry family where it looks like they haven't heard the bad news from Appomattox.

Anyway Tibbett who's been on the road with pals Roland Young and Cliff Edwards returns home to the old plantation presided over by Emma Dunn and her two children Hedda Hopper and Purnell Pratt. Pratt's a dull witted lummox of a man who doesn't know that his wife Esther Ralston is running away with his friend Theodore Von Eltz.

Anyway Tibbett arrives and unsettles a whole lot. He also gets to sing Life Is A Dream and Without A Song and snatches of other numbers and a song with the field hands who are referred to as 'pickaninnies'. That's the reason The Prodigal didn't get many viewings after the 60s.

Besides Tibbett's singing I have to give some kudos to Roland Young playing a droll cashiered former English army surgeon who has some interesting observations to make.

Still The Prodigal will not find favor with many.