The Wedding Night

Basically a weepie about the star-crossed love between an unhappily married man and an immigrant girl being forced into an arranged marriage. Discreetly lavish (it was the last, following Nana and We Live Again, of Sam Goldwyn's three attempts to promote Sten as a major star) and beautifully shot by Gregg Toland, it is handled with sensitivity by Vidor. But Cooper is rather miscast as a writer escaping the New York socialite round to get back to the soil; the ethnic customs of the Polish tobacco-growing community are too sketchy as well as too picturesque (especially in the wedding sequence); and in determinedly avoiding the statutory happy ending, the film achieves melodrama rather than the tragedy it is aiming for.