Madonna of Avenue A

... and maybe that is because everything is gone - sound discs, film, trailers, everything.

Only movie reviews and movie posters survive. It was one of Delores Costello's early talking films, but certainly not her first. The earlier "Noah's Ark", a part talkie, does survive and is occasionally shown on Turner Classic Movies.

Costello plays a teen girl, Maria, who discovers her mother is a dance hall hostess. She is enrolled in a boarding school by her mother to keep her from going down the same path she did, but then Maria partakes of some drinking on a bootlegger's yacht. When discovered she is expelled, and that is when she returns home and finds out how mom makes her living. Maria responds by running off and eloping with her bootlegger boyfriend (Grant Withers). Complications ensue, but they are predictable ones.

So maybe it is more forgivable that Warner Brothers lost this routine programmer than it is that they lost Gold Diggers of Broadway from the same year, still it would have been nice to see something that ticks all of the boxes of life in the roaring twenties, made at the end of that era rather than interpreted afterwards in the late 30s.

This was also an early talking role for Grant Withers who had a shooting star of a leading man career over at Warner Brothers, one that went to supporting roles by 1932.