May 24 movie: Their Own Desire. I really enjoyed this 1929 melodrama. Norma Shearer stars as a girl whose father (Lewis Stone) leaves her mother for another woman. Norma falls in love with Robert Montgomery, a boy whose mother turns out to be the new fling of her father. Confused? It makes sense while you're watching it.
The weird thing about this movie is the attitude towards divorce. Norma has a righteous scene condemning her father when she finds out about the divorce, but then the movie does a 180 and seems to suggest that it was the right thing to do. The father and his new girlfriend behave maturely and seem to be sincere about building a new life together. While the mother is so perfectly awful I couldn't blame Stone for walking out on her. Maybe I wasn't supposed to see it that way though.
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