"Babbitt" director William Keighley's lachrymose soap opera about a British aviator crippled from the waist down from a plane crash; his young, vivacious, recently-wed wife, and the husband's coffee bean plantation brother is reminiscent of D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover" even though it is based on Somerset Maugham's 1928 play "The Sacred Flame." The predicament here is that the invalid husband, Maurice Trent (Colin Clive of "Frankenstein") wants his wife to have an affair with his brother. Inevitably, this very thing occurs when the amorous couple are caught in a thunderstorm.. Dr. Harvester (Leo G. Carroll of "North By Northwest") had assured Trent that he will be up and about on his legs about five months later. Maurice isn't easily fooled by Harvester's lie. Not long afterward, Trent takes an overdose of medicine Harvester had been prescribed. After Trent dies, Dr. Harvester fills out the death certificate that Maurice died from heart failure. Initially, Trent's caregiver, Nurse Wayland (Peggy Wood of "The Sound of Music"), accuses Trent's wife, Stella (Josephine Hutchinson of "Nevada Smith"), of killing Maurice. Nurse Wayland is astonished when Maurice's mother, Mrs. Millie Trent (Henrietta Crosman), says that she saw her son the night that he died. A close-up reveals that Maurice had overdosed on his prescription. The nurse decides not to report Trent's death as murder and agrees to support Dr. Harvester's findings that he died from an embolism. Indeed, Maurice decided to kill himself so that he didn't deprive his wife of a happy, useful life. Maurice tells his mother that he doesn't want Stella to know that he has given into suicide. The performances are first-rate, with Colin Clive taking top honors as the doomed husband. Peggy Wood is excellent as Trent's suspicious nurse. "The Right to Live" is a stage-bound tearjerker that qualifies as respectable but tedious.
Review of The Right to Live
