The Valley of Decision
The Magnificent Ambersons, Titanic, and Edna Ferber all come to mind. The Scott family – father Donald Crisp, mother Gladys Cooper, sons Gregory Peck, Dan Duryea, and Marshall Thompson, and daughter Marsha Hunt – operate a thriving steelmill started by Crisp’s dirt-poor immigrant father in Pittsburgh in the 1870s.
Despite their new gentility, Crisp and number one son Peck wish to maintain a feeling of working dignity, while the rest of the clan becomes hopelessly hoity-toity. Meanwhile, on the other side of town,
the Raffertys live, with their crippled father Lionel Barrymore and the ever-so-sweetly-suffering Greer Garson; Rafferty was injured in a workplace accident that would net him at least a half-million dollars these days, but he was really done so badly by the Scotts who kept him on full pay, but his brooding has given him an insane resentment against the Scotts, made Peck risks his family’s finances to create a more contemporary form of smelter after travelling Europe and seeing the growing ways of steel production, and with his father requiring a means to make their product the best in order to avoid being taken by Carnegie.
Peck falls in love with Greer and proposes marriage at the same time – yup, you guessed it (I’ll now start typing simply YYGI). When Greer has one of her dreadful fits of decency, she decides that she would only be a hindrance to Greg’s ardent industrialist ambition, and she also assigns her other suitor, Preston Foster, who lives with her father and is the union’s president, to work for Hunt when she marries some English lord and moves away. Greg’s childhood friend Louise Kane (Jessica Tandy), a paragon of Gilded Age nobility, is continuously romancing him. YYGI – the pull of love is too strong,
and she returns to marry Greg with the Scott family’s consent, but – YYGI – there’s a strike on now, stirred out of all reason by – YYGI – Lionel, with gangs of non-union hooligans stoning the Scott house and destroying Greg’s gorgeous face. This irritates Crisp enough for his snooty son Duryea to summon strikebreakers from Detroit, but Greer’s last-minute frantic intervention brings Foster and Crisp together for a truce, while his younger brother Marshall Thompson is sent to deal with Duryea and his henchmen.
However, YYGI, Marshall becomes inebriated and fails to prevent their arrival, resulting in tense working discussions. Our loves are torn apart, and Peck is forced into a doomed and unhappy marriage with Tandy, who wants their kid raised up as a – gasp! – layabout dandy, while the rest of the family, despite Greg’s pleas, wants to sell the mill for fast cash.
Keep an eye out for updates. This is the kind of soap opera that manages to be very entertaining because it’s played with a real emotional commitment, exceedingly well-produced, and has that wonderful bizarre quality of films from its era that deal with relatively controversial subjects (labour relations, capitalist ethics, contrasting socio-economic spheres) by playing eve with eve with eve with eve with eve with eve with eve with eve with eve with eve with eve with
