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.

For a while this excellent, still moving and relevant antique seems to be a precursor to the notion of the Generation Gap. The parents did it one way. The children do it another.

But it is racy and, though contrived and melodramatic, fascinating.

It is also the single most appealing performance by Robert Young I've ever seen. He did pot have the self-satisfied smirk of several decades of later work. He is very plausible. My second-favorite of his movies is the charming "Lady Be Good," in which he truly seems to enjoy working with Ann Sothern.

"New Morals" still has power and does not deserve its obscurity.

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.

There was a young man who was in two scenes in this movie that is uncredited, and I am trying to find out who he was. He had lines in both of his scenes. He appears first in the scene where Robert Young's character arrives in Paris at the art studio, just as the class is ending. The character/actor I am asking about was introduced as George Macintosh. He is short, young, dark haired, quite handsome, smiles a lot, and introduces Robert Young to the disinterested head of the art studio.

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?