Harridan of the Seine

Harridan and the Seine is a classic Vinewood film produced in 1933 by Sam Austin, starring Miriam Turner, David Allison and Agnes Knight.

Synopsis
There was a migical time when women came with a dowry (money and land!) instead of just showing up and taking half of everything you own. Half! It's why things were so much better during the classic age of film. Such is the story in Harridan and the Seine. A classic Sam Austin faux-Dickensian melodrama and an award-winning performance by Miriam Turner, cast in a perfect role for the wistful, dreamy facial expressions she'd overwrought to such great effect in the silent movies of the 1920s. Turner plays the beautiful but naïve Connie Lavell, a middle-class girl who, like all dumb skirts, falls for a foreigner. It wasn't the landscaper, which I can tell you IS insult to injury, but he was a Frenchman. After begging her father to pay a dowry of $100, she marries Bernard and moves to Paris, only to discover that the silver-tongued bastard is selling her into slavery. Far from the charming sophisticate she met in New York, Bernand is rat-catcher who lives in the slums with his malicious crone of a mother, Huguette, Huguette sets about making Connie's every waking moment a living hell, forcing her to eat out of chamber pots and massage her calloused feet. Her only solace comes at 6pm each day when a handsome aristocrat walks by on the other side of the river and fleetingly reveals himself to her. There appears to be no escape from Connie's squalid, demeaning existence until one day when a drunken Bernard is passed out cold she stabs him in the neck, pushes his mother off the edge of a bridge and then sings a mournful lament as a trolley runs her over. They don't make them like this anymore!

Comments

 * reeltalker - "Five hours of my life I'll never get back." - 0/10 stars
 * femcritter - "Once again woman portrayed as either vicious witches or helpless bimbos. Why celebrate this misogynistic trash?" - 2/10 stars
 * gravyluva - "What I'd give to spill one on Miriam Turner's heaving breasts." - 6/10 stars
 * milkfox - "Sam Austin is a legend. He was the original Jew in the entertainment industry. That dude built Vinewood." - 8/10 stars
 * gobblenuttz - "Would have been better as a silent movie." - 2/10 stars
 * doddlejenn - "Sam Austin never paid any of his actors a dime! He's half the reason the unions became such assholes" - 4/10 stars
 * milkfox - "Just so we're clear, I don't usually hate Jews. Some of them are really cool. I don't like blacks, though, which is why I don't like sports." - 8/10 stars
 * goldenpaige - "Turner is the epitome of beauty, grace and class. They don't make them like that any more." - 7/10 stars
 * slatherick - "Get real. Miriam Turner was a violent drunk who once stabbed her assistant with a pen." - 2/10 stars
 * milkfox - "Miriam Turner hated blacks, too." - 8/10 stars