Simply put, THE RIGHT TO LIFE arguably features the tragic Colin Clive's greatest performance on film. Made just before BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, and costarring Josephine Hutchinson, who four years later would become "The Bride of the SON OF FRANKENSTEIN" to Basil Rathbone in the third of the Universal "Frankenstein" series (effectively becoming the late Colin Clive's daughter-in-law!), this film gives you the chance to see the much-tortured Clive just before he had to crank himself back up to a fever pitch for James Whale as Henry Frankenstein in BRIDE. His final scene with Hutchinson in THE RIGHT TO LIVE is utterly, believably heartbreaking. Two years later, he was dead, his ashed remaining unclaimed in the basement of a Hollywood mortuary for the next 41 years. Henrietta Crosman, so insidiously jealous and selfish in John Ford's great 1933 masterpiece PILGRIMAGE, superbly plays a VERY different sort of mother here, and the supporting cast is outstanding.
Review of The Right to Live
