New Morals for Old

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.

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.

The generation gap in 1932.Two retired people see their children (a boy and a girl) turn their back on mom's nice rice pudding and want to marry a divorcée (the girl) and to go and study art in Paris (the boy).

All in all ,neither the obsolete precepts of the old nor the modern way of life of the young are satisfying .Travel broadens the mind ,for sure,but when your talent is mediocre ,the best of art professors cannot do anything for you ,even if he teaches (or is supposed to) in French.And it's almost probable that the two rebels will become their parents without a sound.The last pictures glorify Family with a capital F.

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.

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.