New Morals for Old

Parents will have a tough time getting through New Morals for Old without staining a Kleenex or two with tears. The entire point of the film is that children never listen to their parents, even though their lessons are wise and worthy, and after they've seen a bit of life, they realize that their parents were right all along. If you hate your parents and don't want to eventually eat crow, you're not going to want to watch Robert Young and Margaret Perry do it in the movie. Watch something else tonight.

Margaret Perry is absolutely adorable, and even though she falls in love with a married man, David Newell, and becomes his mistress in a love nest, you can't help but love her. This was her first of two total films, and I have no idea why she didn't rocket to stardom. Not only is she cute to look at, but she has talent! In the movie, she really does feel bad about causing a rift in her family. She collapses in tears in her father Lewis Stone's lap when she tells him how she's living. Mother Laura Hope Crews won't receive David in the house and has a very strained relationship with her daughter forever after. Meanwhile, playboy Robert Young refuses to settle down and get a respectable job. He travels to Paris to become an artist and shacks up with the morally loose Myrna Loy.

If you like the message, this movie is worth watching. The acting is very good, and there are some pre-Code aspects that are sure to evoke a giggle. When Robert studies art, he attends the classic class to draw nudes, and since this movie was made in 1932, the model is shown. Myrna's ten minutes on the screen are also very raunchy, and the script makes no secret to her type of relationship with Bob.

Though hardly an example of pre-Code films at their raciest, the matter-of-fact treatment of looser sexual mores in this family drama may reveal more about its times than a more exploitative film would. A few years later Lewis Stone, the father here, would play the father of the most straightlaced and retrograde family in movie history (Andy Hardy's); yet here he is shown as accepting the idea that his son would go off to Paris to be an artist (and be shown breakfasting the next morning with his female neighbor, in pajamas) and that his daughter would have an affair with a married man, musing to his wife that they just have to get used to the different morals of different times. No masterpiece, but a sweet and enjoyable film that may remind you of James Ivory's Mr. and Mrs. Bridge.

Lewis Stone and Laura Hope Crewes are a couple of old fuddy-duddies. They worry about their children, Robert Young and Margaret Perry. They seem to spend all their time in speakeasies, and Young doesn't pay attention to business as he ought to. Then Stone dies, and Young busts loose in Paris, intent on becoming a painter, and meeting exotic Myrna Loy, who turns out to be American. Miss Perry brings home a man, and Miss Crewes suggests separate bedrooms, for propriety's sake. They say no.

In title and attitudes, this is pretty much a pre-code movie, but being MGM, and based on a play by John van Druten, is it going to be as wild as it sounds at the beginning? This is pretty much second-string MGM, with Young announcing he wants to run barefoot through Miss Loy's hair. Well, who can blame him?

This is a very ordinary precode involving the wealthy Thomases. The parents (Lewis Stone and Laura Hope Crews) are worried about their two grown children. Son Ralph (Robert Young) as well as daughter Phyl (Margaret Perry) are taken to partying every night and sleeping until noon. Ralph's individual demon is that he fancies himself more than a designer of wallpaper at the family business - he wants to go to France and become a great artist. Phyl's problem is that she is in love with a married man (David Newell as Duf) whose wife won't let him go. Both kids wind up doing what they want to do in spite of their parents' objections. Ralph does go to France to study art. Phyl sets up house with Duf with no hope of marriage in sight. So far this is an extraordinarily ordinary precode. So what makes it worthwhile? For one, one kid winds up with their hopes dashed the other gets their wish. Which one triumphs and which one does not and how this happens is the unexpected part. Also very interesting is a tryst Ralph has with a French neighbor when he is in Paris. That neighbor happens to be played by Myrna Loy and the nature of the tryst is what is so unexpected. In one scene she is complaining about the noise Ralph is making. In the next scene it is the next morning and she and Ralph are bouncing around in their pajamas! What's more we never see the French girl again in Ralph's life. How realistic that not every sexual encounter leads to either tragedy or the altar, which is something that would never be allowed in the production code era.

The ending is warm although abrupt as the kids grow a few years older and seem to be gradually becoming their parents. Plus both kids grow a genuine appreciation for Aunty Doe (Elizabeth Patterson), someone they ridiculed just a few years before as silly and out of touch.

This one is an OK time passer, but there really is nothing out of the ordinary to distinguish it from other precodes of the era other than the chance to see two stars just starting out - Myrna Loy and Robert Young - and one star of the stage making a rare film appearance - Margaret Perry.

Boring old creaker about two terrible children (Robert Young, Margaret Perry) breaking their elderly parents' hearts. At least that's how I interpreted it. The point is a little muddled as it seems to be saying the younger generation has loose morals but the older is stuffy and old-fashioned. That the younger will eventually become the older and "rinse, lather, repeat" is the ultimate point, I suppose. Only worth seeing for early work by Young and Myrna Loy, as well as to see Judge Hardy with a son who doesn't listen to a word he says. Despite being pre-Code and having somewhat risqué subject manner, there's nothing here to get worked up over.