One More River (Universal, 1934)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Following the Lifetime movie Death Saved My Life, Charles and I returned to the James Whale oeuvre for One More River, a Universal prestige production from 1934 that was stamped Class with a capital “C.” It was based on the final novel in the Forsyte series by John Galsworthy (his Wikipedia page lists no fewer than 18 books Galsworthy published dealing with the Forsytes and their clan), called Over the River in Galsworthy’s native Britain but changed to One More River by his U.S. publisher. Galsworthy had published the book in 1932, just before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he was too ill to attend the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm and he died just a few weeks later. The combination of Galsworthy’s Nobel and his death seemed to convince Universal that the attention paid to both events in the public media would make a movie of One More River a box-office winner despite the obvious problems with the Production Code.

The story deals with Claire Cherrell Corwen (Diana Wynyard), unhappily married to Sir Gerald Corwen (Colin Clive), who as the story opens is just returning from a long stay in Ceylon (now the independent country of Sri Lanka). On the ship coming over she met and more or less dated – the “more or less” will become significant later on – Tony Croom (young British actor Frank Lawton, a year before he would play the adult David Copperfield in MGM’s 1935 film of Charles Dickens’ classic), who fell in love with her, though she was decorous enough not to do anything physical with him. Croom wants her to stay in London for at least one more day with him, but she insists she has to return to her home in the British countryside and to her family, who include sister Dinny Cherrell (Jane Wyatt in her first film; she’s probably most famous for movies like Marked Woman in which she played Bette Davis’s innocent younger sister and usually died before the final reel), her formidable aunt Lady Mont (played by Mrs. Patrick Campbell, a legendary British actress who had been the first Eliza Doolittle in the premiere of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, who came on the set in full diva mode and was treated by James Whale with great respect and awe) and her husband, Sir Laurence Mott (Henry Stephenson).

The big Production Code problem with One More River is that Sir Gerald Corwen was depicted as not only an abusive husband but a sexual sadist who got a sick thrill from beating his wife. The Code Authority told Whale and his writer, R. C. Sherriff (who’d written Journey’s End, the World War I play that had made Whale’s reputation when he directed it first on stage and then on film, and the script for Whale’s film The Invisible Man), that they could make Sir Gerald a wife-beater but could not suggest that he got any sexual thrill out of it – though they did sneak in a line in which, after one of the two times he grabs Claire in an aggressive embrace that he obviously intends as a prelude to rape, he says, “Some women like rough treatment.” When she arrives the region is in the middle of a Parliamentary election campaign in which her family is supporting David Dornford (Reginald Denny), who wins and promises Claire a job as his secretary in London.

But that plotline gets sidetracked relatively quickly and the main intrigue kicks off when, driving back home late at night, Claire and Tony get stuck with car trouble and decide that, rather than walk several miles to the nearest town in the dark, they’ll just sleep in the car. They don’t get any farther than Tony’s head on Claire’s shoulder, but that’s enough; Sir Gerald has been having detectives follow them, looking for evidence of adultery so he can divorce Claire and ruin her reputation. Claire is caught in a Catch-22 situation in which if she loses the divorce trial she’ll be branded as an adulteress and banished from any polite society (and, though it’s not openly stated, she’ll probably lose her job with Dornford because as a politician he couldn’t afford to be linked to the scandal), while if she wins she’ll be cleared of the charge of adultery but be forced to stay with a man who abuses her and whom she can’t stand. The heart of the film is the courtroom scenes, in which the prosecutor is Brough (Lionel Atwill – given both his and Whale’s reputation it’s surprising that neither of their two films together is a horror movie, but he’s quite despicable enough in this part it doesn’t matter) and her defense attorney (a rather hapless Alan Mowbray) is the only character in this film actually named Forsyte.

Though Sherriff’s dialogue (and presumably Galsworthy’s as well) had to be circumspect and euphemistic, Sir Gerald tries to pour more accelerant on the fire he’s building to destroy his wife’s reputation by claiming – falsely – that she had sex with him before that night in the car with Tony and thereby reaffirmed their romantic relationship. The judge bars any evidence that Sir Gerald physically abused his wife, and Claire herself is either too circumspect or just too afraid to testify about the details of their marriage. Eventually, after a proceeding that seems preposterous in the age of “no-fault divorce” (Galsworthy’s own wife had been through a similarly nasty divorce from her first husband, so the issue was personal for him), the jury finds that Claire and Tony did commit adultery, though since Tony is broke the judge agrees to sentence him only to court costs and not the 2,000-pound fine the law would allow him to impose. Claire and Tony ultimately flee the countryside and start a new, considerably less affluent but less complicated life.

One More River was reportedly a major hit in Britain, where audiences liked the fact that it got the look of the British countryside “right” even though, aside from a few process backgrounds and stock shots, none of it was filmed there, but in the U.S. it was one of those movies that did great business in the relatively cosmopolitan cities like New York and San Francisco but attracted far fewer people in smaller cities and the rural areas that still predominated. Critics generally praised it except for Frank Lawton, who was considered too young and immature for his role – though I think he’s just right for the part: a more charismatic, sexier performer like Cary Grant or Errol Flynn would have thrown off the balance of the story (and no one would have believed Diana Wynyard could have survived a night in a car with Errol Flynn with her virtue intact!). Lawton projects his infatuation with Claire as just the sort of puppy love one would expect from a man his age, and he looks so immature we can paradoxically believe in his innocence.

Wynyard is superb in her role even though she and Whale didn’t get along (a surprise since he usually preferred to work with British actors, both because they came from the same culture and because they were far less likely to be homophobic – their attitude was, “Oh, he’s Gay? A lot of theatre people are Gay. So what?”), and Clive is superb as usual even though he’s hardly showcased as much as he was in his other Whale films, Journey’s End, Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein. The acting honors here are taken by Mrs. Patrick Campbell (who would make only two more films, her last being as the landlady in the 1935 Josef von Sternberg Crime and Punishment, and unlike Whale, Sternberg treated her as if determined to break her down from her pedestal and insisted on her wearing character makeup to make her look uglier) and the superbly vicious prosecutor played by Lionel Atwill (who’d appear unforgettably as the one-armed police chief in Son of Frankenstein, alas after Whale left the series!). Though The Forsyte Saga has been filmed in toto at least twice by the BBC in mini-series format, these outlier movies like One More River and the 1949 MGM film That Forsyte Woman (with Greer Garson in the title role and Errol Flynn superb in anti-type casting as her stuck-up husband Soames Forsyte; MGM had originally wanted Flynn for one of the men she allegedly cheats on him with, but Flynn insisted on playing Soames, and played him brilliantly) certainly do justice to Galsworthy’s world and his social and moral concerns.