The Faithful Heart

Herbert Marshall appears here in his last film before his successful transfer to Hollywood.This is based on a stage play and which clearly owes much of its genesis to the Fannie Hurst school of weepie.All logic disappears out of the window at various points of the story.Both Marshall and Best turn in effective performances.

Quirky little romantic drama about a sailor (Herbert Marshall) who pursues a barmaid (Edna Best) while on leave. They fall in love, but he's called up to ship out to South Africa. He goes away, vowing to become a success and return. He never does. Story skips ahead 20 years to find Marshall a war hero (the Boer War) and being decorated by the Queen. He's on the verge of marrying a snooty woman (Anne Grey) when he's called upon by a young woman (Best again) who turns out to be his daughter. She's a dead ringer for the girl he loved all those years ago. He learns that the mother died in child birth and that the young woman is all alone in the world. He's torn between his soon-to-be wife and his newfound daughter. But the bride wants nothing to do with this grown-up daughter and plots to ship her to a distant relative in Canada and even gives her the passage money. Marshall is forced to make a decision.

This is one of Edna Best's best performances. She very good at making the two characters very different. Herbert Marshall is also quite good as the randy seaman and his older self. Grey is suitably nasty. Others in the cast include Mignon O'Doherty as Miss Gattiscombe, Laurence Hanray as the Major, Athole Stewart as Sir Gilbert, and Griffith Jones as the art lover at a party.

The beginning of Faithful Hearts is so funny, but the rest of it is so awful; it's like they're two different movies pasted together. Herbert Marshall starts off as a Cockney sailor on leave during the turn of the century. He stumbles into a bar run by an aunt and her two nieces, and he makes it his mission to seduce one of the young girls, Edna Best (who was his wife in real life at the time). He throws smile after joke after line at her, but she's not interested. Finally, he leaves the bar, only to come back with one of the best pick-up lines I've ever heard. "I've come to give you something. One more chance." She finally cracks a smile...and the movie goes downhill.

A one-night stand turns into true love, and Herbie's Cockney accent disappears to make him seem more genuine. He has a three-week assignment and Edna's afraid he'll never return. Then the movie shows the date of a newspaper; it's twenty years later and he never did return. There's never any explanation, mind you. The audience is completely left hanging and wondering why he's turned into a cultured gentleman during the past twenty years. If you want to see him playing against type in the first ten minutes, it's very cute. But turn it off after Edna starts blubbering. Trust me, it's so awful, you'll be tearing your hair out at the seemingly endless running time. In truth, this movie isn't even ninety minutes; but it feels like four hours.

Herbert Marshall leaves his ship and hits a pub. He's a boastful young man, and tells the striking barmaid, Edna Best, that he was a fourth mate a year ago, and he'll be a skipper soon enough. The two rag each other, and fall in love. But orders come in, to take over as Second Mate on a ship around South Africa, so she sends him off, each saying they'll never forget each other.

Twenty years pass, and Marshall is getting his Victoria Cross, and visiting his fiancee, Anne Grey. Her father is rich, but Marshall is determined to stand on his own feet, and Miss Grey cannily understands that the man she loves can be a great man. But one day in his office, in walks a girl. She's Edna Best, playing her own daughter....by Marshall.

It's a little stiff at times, and the sound work is still a trifle primitive, but it's a sweet little movie directed by Victor Saville, with a lot of talent in the writing department: Lajos Biró, Monckton Hoffe, Angus MacPhail, and Robert Stevenson. It's also helped bythe fact that Marshall and Miss Best play their roles with a warm intimacy; they were married at the time.