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I've never seen Walter Huston in anything in which he's not brilliant and this doesn't disappoint either. This dark and moody drama isn't particularly fun but it's a satisfying watch.

This is another great example showing what a great actor Walter Huston was. His character evokes the sense of a volcano just about to erupt but restrained by an impermeable layer of pure cold granite. He's a right nasty piece of work in this, a horrible thug without any likeable qualities whatsoever. But Huston being a proper actor still manages to captivate your imagination. He makes you want to know if he's really that unpleasant, whether under that rough stony exterior is a heart of gold but he only shows you that he's not hiding his feelings, he just doesn't have any. Even getting married by Emperor Ming doesn't cheer him up! Like his performance in KONGO, he's a cold hearted monster but he's also a believable damaged human being.

This isn't a typical 1930s picture. The only thing which dates it to that period is its early talkies style. It's set in the early 30s but it's not the 1930s we are familiar with. We are in a remote fishing village where gangsters and gold diggers are as alien to them as they are to us now. Places and macho societies like this were probably unchanged since the time of Moby Dick. The concept of a mail order bride, for woman to enter a life of serfdom in exchange for somewhere to live seems dumbfounding to us in our comfortable modern world but these were very desperate times. It's fascinating to get a glimpse into how we lived.

This is only William Wyler's third ever talkie so it's not going to be his best work but this is from the man who seven years later would make the best film ever, WUTHERING HEIGHTS so it's still superbly made. Although made by Universal, who weren't known for splashing the cash on their pictures, the production standards, for 1932 anyway are pretty good. The finale in the storm is quite impressive.

It's not particularly uplifting nor does it make you feel happier after you've watched it. It's a very serious dark drama so you need to be in the right mood for this. It is however a great story, a jaw-dropping insight into another world and if you want to see some great acting, you can't go wrong with this.

Although you might hear a lot of folks talk about the likes of Ingmar Bergman, Martin Scorsese, Akira Kurosawa or Alfred Hitchcock being the best directors of all time, to me this title could easily be claimed by the far less famous William Wyler. While his name is not so familiar today, you'd have a hard time finding any director who could come close to approaching the number of huge hits he helmed. Think about it...this guy made "Ben Hur", "The Best Years of Our Lives", "The Big Country", "Dodsworth", "Jezebel", "The Letter", "Little Foxes", "Mrs. Miniver", "The Heiress" and many other great films. He also received the Best Director Oscar three times! Talk about a great track record. However, in 1931, Wyler was still a relative unknown--working here for a second-rate studio (Universal) and with a B-movie script. And, his directing the film was THE reason I chose to see "A House Divided".

When the film begins, the seaman, Seth Law (Walter Huston), has just buried his wife. Instead of mourning, this cold-hearted beast goes to the nearby bar to celebrate...a berates his less rugged son Matt (Douglass Montgomery) for being a sissy because he's sad about this death! Then, showing the depth of his awfulness, Seth then almost immediately buys a mail-order wife. After all, he needs someone to clean, cook and take care of him. Matt is appalled. However, when the new bride to be arrives, she's not the lady he ordered. Instead, Ruth (Helen Chandler) is very young, small and pretty. She agrees to marry Seth anyway but soon he regrets it because Seth is a nasty pig who seems an awful lot like Bluto from the Popeye cartoons! In addition, she soon finds herself attracted not to Seth but Matt!

So why does the film only merit a 5? Well, the pacing is a serious problem. Since it's essentially a B-movie, the director was forced to have the film run at only about 60 minutes--and this meant cutting corners. So, Ruth changes her mind way, way too fast about Seth as well as Matt and it all just seemed rushed and, as a result, difficult to believe. Not a bad film but it misses the mark too often to be of any interest except to nuts like me who love Wyler's work...even his lesser stuff.

The film opens with the funeral of Walter Huston's wife who was also Douglass Montgomery's mother. Huston's incredibly strong performance as the fisherman father with little sympathy for anybody or anything but fishing, staying alive, and drinking at the local bar is riveting. He orders a mail-order bride through a magazine - to do the housework, cook, mend the nets - you get the drift. She arrives, but she's another who's taken the place of the original girl who had already married. She's also much prettier. Only 19 and one of six daughters to a Montana wheat farmer, the girl marries Huston. She falls in love with his son, Montgomery, a man his father thinks is weak. Among bit parts, you may spot Walter Brennan, Mary Foy, Gibson Gowland, Mary Gordon, Vivien Oakland, and Marjorie Main.

The action in the film is strong, the fluidity of the camera for the year really good. The final scene is spectacular, the camera work really magnificent, as Huston straps himself into a boat to go rescue his wife, who had gone out on the fishing boat when a storm breaks out. Why was Huston strapped to the boat you might ask? Because he's now crippled, without the use of his legs, thanks to a knock-down, drag-out fight with his son where he falls down a flight of stairs. It might seem like Huston is warming up for the part of Dead Legs in Kongo the following year, but then he'd been playing that part on the stage since 1926, so maybe THAT play was the warmup for THIS movie.

There's little that redeems the character played by Huston, but the performance is superlative. Helen Chandler gives what may be her best performance. Montgomery was never better. With William Wyler's direction in one of his early sound films, this is really a knock-out. You may remember that Wyler made "Dodsworth" with Huston later. He also made "Come and Get It" in 1936, a film that resonates with the same kind of theme and a strong performance from Edward Arnold.

For those out there curious about the brief career of Helen Chandler due to her appearance in "Dracula," this is perhaps her finest showcase. Issued at the same time as "Frankenstein," this is another impressive early talkie from Universal, directed by the renowned William Wyler, well known for working with such diverse actresses as Bette Davis (who actually lost this role to Chandler), Vivien Leigh, Audrey Hepburn, and Barbra Streisand (earning no less than 3 Best Director Oscars). Walter Huston plays the widowed fisherman who sends away for a mail-order bride, only to end up with the much-too-pretty Chandler, who soon falls for his sensitive son (Douglass Montgomery), whom his father frowns upon as a weakling. The waterlogged climax finds Huston auditioning for his meaty role in "Kongo," made at MGM the next year. Billed under the name 'Kent Douglass' (for the fifth and last time), Montgomery had just completed James Whale's "Waterloo Bridge," opposite Mae Clarke, returning to Universal for 1935's "Mystery of Edwin Drood" (later cast as the surprise villain in 1939's "The Cat and the Canary"). Walter Huston was perhaps aided by son John, credited with dialogue, as he also would be on Lugosi's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" and his father's next Universal, "Law and Order"; the career of Helen Chandler virtually came to a halt by 1938 (she died in 1965).

Reminding me on some aesthetic and general level of Fritz Lang's later Clash by Night, William Wyler's A House Divided is a work in yet another genre for the young, talented filmmaker: drama. We get a dose of special effects at the end while Wyler continues to demonstrate how much he do with the earliest of sound technologies to keep his filmmaking as much his own until sound caught up with the freedom of movement of silent film, and it's a solidly built film, anchored by a trio of dedicated and strong performances while never letting Wyler lose his strong eye, though the obviously increased reliance on capturing sound on set does limit his visual options at the same time.

Seth Law (Walter Huston) and his son Matt (Douglass Montgomery) bury Seth's wife in their seaside cemetery. Seth is the richest man of the fishing town, his family being the first to settle on it and owning the largest house. Seth is also a man of large appetites who mourns the loss of his wife by taking Matt to a bar, drinking heavily, dancing, and getting into a wrestling match with another man for the company of a woman. Matt cannot partake, watching his father's display with a measure of disgust. Matt feels like he doesn't belong on the sea fishing with his father and dreams of going inland to work on a farm.

The running of the household is too much for the two of them alone, and when their housekeeper leaves after a mere two weeks, Seth decides to write for a wife using a magazine where women present themselves as potential wives for lonely men. He decides on a middle-aged, well-built woman who could work and sends off the letter. The girl he wrote to, though, had already married by the time the letter arrived, and Ruth (Helen Chandler), a nineteen year old farm girl, one of six daughters to a widowed father, arrives in her stead.

The drama of the film is how the three main characters all have mutual and exclusive desires, interests, and needs. Ruth, having spent her life on a farm in Montana, has never seen the sea and took the opportunity to get away from the remote, futureless existence she had been living. Seth wants a housekeeper he doesn't need to pay, and he grows to appreciate Ruth's youth, beauty, and skill in the kitchen. Matt wants to escape his father and life of fishing in the seaside town, but he also falls for the pretty girl suddenly at his door looking for marriage who happens to be his own age. The two younger people are up against a strong and controlling man, the wealthiest man on the island who can throw together a giant wedding celebration for the entire town at the drop of a hat.

Things take a turn when, at the end of the wedding celebration, Ruth expresses distress at her situation, wanting space from Seth, but Seth wants what's his due on his wedding night. Matt tries to protect Ruth, leading to Seth falling from their stairs and crippling himself from the waist down. What do Matt and Ruth do? Their actions are determined by their characters. Ruth is a good woman dedicated to her promises, so she stays. Matt is in love with Ruth and feels guilty for having convinced her to stay in the first place, so he stays. Seth is a strong man and determined to gain his legs back, all while feeling owed Ruth's love in the first place.

This final act is where the meat of the film is, and it's really helped by the film's almost myopic focus on the events in the house with the three characters. There are virtually no other characters, and the singular view on the events in the house give the film a play-like feel, making it all the more surprising that this wasn't based on a pre-existing stage production. This gave Wyler a smaller canvas to paint on compared to Hell's Heroes, which tied him more to the more standard sound capture technology of tied down microphones hidden on set which, combined with the need to eliminate the sound of the camera which necessitated the camera being in a box, limits the movement of the camera, where he could put the camera, and the kinds of expertly constructed and complex compositions he had shown so capable of creating in his silent films. When he does film silent, like the opening at the cemetery, he can find the three-dimensions to the image he's so good at, but on the house set, where most of the film takes place, he's far more limited and the film looks far more generic.

The finale is a big special effects sequence on the sea, at night, and in a storm, and it looks great as the three characters run together in different ways and for their own purposes. I admired this ending more than I actually felt it, feeling that despite the film's laser focus on its core characters, we needed more time with them, particularly Ruth and in regards to the relationship between father and son, to make it play out as well as it should. I would have really liked to see Ruth's reading of the letter and convincing to go to the seaside town back in Montana, as well as some of the train ride to more firmly establish what she was running from. I would have also liked to see more dimension to the father/son relationship beyond antagonism.

Still, as a whole, it's an effective little drama. It could have used some more meat on its bones to give the characters a bit more depth so that the actions of the finale played out a bit more emotionally, but it's still an accomplished and well-written little piece early in the sound era.