Le père prodigue

When the film begins, Clara has had enough of her husband's drinking and irresponsible lifestyle. Not surprisingly, she takes her baby and leaves.

Decades pass. The baby is grown and now David (Richard Greene) is heading off to college. He soon makes friends...both with a nerdy farm boy who is also a student as well as with one of his professors (Roland Young). As a result of getting to know this English professor, David learns that his biological father, Duke (Richard Dix), was one of his students long ago and Duke was apparently a star football player at the college long ago. So, David goes to meet him and soon David and Duke establish a relationship. Duke is still irresponsible and a drinker, but he wants to be someone his son can respect...and he cleans himself up and gets a good job at the local paper.

Now here is the odd part. All this that I've told you really has very little to do with what is coming next! It involves a hit and run death and a pack of liars....and you'll just have to see it for yourself to know where it's all going next.

The acting in this one is very good all around....Greene, Dix, Young and the rest. The odd twist towards the end is generally good, but also seemed hard to believe. I still am not sure if I liked it or not! Overall, a decent film but one which left me a bit confused.

Gladys George left Richard Dix nineteen years ago. He couldn't hold a job, drank, and the Great Novel he was working on was going nowhere. Now she is married to George Zucco, and Miss George's child with Dix is grown to be Richard Greene, about to go off to the college where his elders all went. A friendship with professor Roland Young and his daughter, Brenda Joyce, leads Greene to Dix.

Father and son help each other grow. Dix quits the booze and gets a job on a newspaper. Dix's attitude towards people knocks the snobbery out of Greene. It all comes to a head when David is in the car when a fellow college student strikes and kills a woman, and David is expected to lie to protect a member of his class, while Russell Gleason, who's working his way through college, will take the rap.

It's a fine cast under the direction of Roy Del Ruth working on a good script. Richard Dix, as he does whenever he gets a chance to actually act, is superb; Roland Young is wonderful (of course) and Brenda Joyce gets a fine part as the unlikely ingenue. It's Greene who gives a performance that is an eye-opener: not so much in the way he speaks his lines, but in the way he moves just like Dix does.