The Life of Vergie Winters (1934)

The Life of Vergie Winters is a 1934 pre-code RKO melodrama and it’s a bit of a tearjerker. And it’s certainly very pre-code.

The story begins in 1912 in the small American town of Parkville. It’s a town that thrives on gossip.

There’s a prologue, with a funeral and a woman in prison although we have not the slightest idea what could have led up to this.

And the story proper begins with a romance that has unfortunate complications. Aspiring politician John Shadwell (John Boles) is all set to marry milliner Vergie Winters (Ann Harding) until some very unpleasant people put a spanner in the works. A rich man who wants his own daughter to marry Laura (Helen Vinson) to marry Shadwell bribes Vergie’s father to tell Shadwell a scandalous lie, that Vergie will have to marry young Hugo McQueen (Lon Chaney Jr.) because he’s managed to get Vergie pregnant. In fact Vergie is not and never was pregnant and has never had any involvement all all with Hugo.

But Shadwell believes the lie and breaks the engagement to Vergie. An up-and-coming politician could not possibly marry such a scandalous woman. Shadwell heads off to Washington and what promises to be a glittering political career.

All this has happened before the real story gets going. That story kicks in when Shadwell, on an electioneering visit to Parkville, finds out what a horrible mistake he has made. He is now married to Laura, a woman he does not love. He has lost the chance of marrying the woman he really loves, Vergie, and all because he believed a terrible lie and never thought at the time to find out if there was any truth in the accusation. Now Shadwell and Vergie are doomed to unhappiness.

They are not however prepared to accept this unhappiness. They begin a clandestine affair, an affair that lasts for twenty years. And Vergie has his child, a daughter.

In outrageous melodrama style Shadwell persuades his wife that they should adopt this child as their own. Of course he isn’t crazy enough to tell Laura that the child is his, and Vergie’s. He spins her a story about the child’s parentage which she accepts.

Of course you’re not going to be able to appreciate this movie unless you accept that it takes place in a very different society, a society in which divorce was a career-ending scandal for a politician and in which adultery was slightly more shameful than murder. If you don’t accept this then you’re just not going to understand why Shadwell and Vergie are prepared to go on with their clandestine affair, a love that they must keep forever hidden.

That secret affair is enough for Shadwell and Vergie but there were a couple of things they had overlooked. One was the sheer viciousness of the gossip-ridden town of Parkville. The second was that Laura is both intelligent and suspicious. Keeping a clandestine affair clandestine is not necessarily something that can be done indefinitely.

The ending is perhaps rather contrived but melodrama has its own genre conventions and contrived endings that would never be acceptable in other genres are quite acceptable in melodrama. I think the ending works satisfactorily enough.

There’s plenty of emotional suffering in this movie but there is an extraordinary love that makes such suffering bearable.

Ann Harding is OK as Vergie although she is just a tad on the insipid side. John Boles is convincing as the ambitious politician. The script doesn’t do Helen Vinson any favours - it isn’t easy to make Laura sympathetic but we do at least understand her motivations.

The Life of Vergie Winters is a reasonably entertaining melodrama and it’s worth a look.

This movie is included in the five-movie Spanish Verdice Pre-Code RKO Volume 1 DVD boxed sets. All five films are in English with removable Spanish subtitles and the transfer are fine. From this set I’ve previously reviewed State’s Attorney (1932), The Common Law (1931), Kept Husbands (1931) and Lonely Wives (1931). All these films are worth seeing. The set is still in print and it’s very much worth grabbing.