Harridan of the Seine: Difference between revisions

{{quote|There was a magical 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 of 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's overwrought to sugh great effect in the silent movies of the 1920s. Turner plays the beautiful but naive Connie Lavell, a middle-class girl who, like all dumb skirts, falls for a foreigner. 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 charmeing sophisticate she met in New York, Bernard is a rat-catcher who lives in the slums with his malicious crone of a mother, Huguette. Huguette sets about making Connie's every waking momnet 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!}}