5/10
see it for the acting
26 March 2010
The performances by Leo Carrillo, Constance Cummings, Robert Young and Leslie Fenton make compelling entertainment out of this rather routinely mounted drama about the social hardships faced by the grown children of successful Italian-American gangsters. While they live in the splendor of their parents' ill-gotten gains they remain social pariahs and must go to great lengths to achieve respectable lives.

Cummings and Young are a sort of Romeo and Juliet, offspring of rival criminal kingpins Carrillo and Karloff, respectively, who fall in love. Carrillo is quite scary as a cold-blooded hoodlum, but Karloff can't get the accent right and sounds awkwardly British, and bearing no resemblance of any kind to Robert Young doesn't help. Leslie Fenton as Carrillo's dissolute son does a good job playing nasty, particularly in a well-shot scene that has him rampaging through a garden party and knocking guest after fully clothed guest into the pool.
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