Unholy Love

The static direction of Albert Ray reduces this aloof adaptation of "Madame Bovary" to a chore to watch. Unsuspecting Depression Era audiences were expected to sit through a listless drama of uppercrust folks in Rye, New York, supposedly an escape from the problems of their own working class existence, but the characters and story are remote.

Lyle Talbot is poor as the hapless hero whose wife Joyce Compton cheats on him with the creepy European played by Ivan Lebedeff. Lila Lee plays the girl who was set to marry Lyle in the first place, and H. B. Warner is stuffy as his father. It's extremely difficult to care about any of them, and if this was meant to be titillating at the time, based on the infidelity theme, it fails miserably.