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Truly Dreadful Film

Absolutely Brilliant!

A Masterpiece!

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

This early talkie has a running time of only 65 minutes. No surprise, then, that the story is rather thin. The lead character, Lally (Norma Shearer), is a young woman torn between her love for a man and her allegiance to her mother, who clings to her. Although Lally longs to reach out for personal happiness and to marry Jack (Robert Montgomery), she struggles to overcome her mother's indoctrination against marriage, which is based upon the failure of her own union.Editing is choppy in "Their Own Desire" and the photography provides little beauty that might reflect the love between Lally and Jack. Stronger is the insidious, unhealthy devotion of Lally to her mother.The ending feels false and simplistic, with no real resolution of the conflict. Still, Norma Shearer acquits herself well, showing a range of emotions.

The Amendment giving women the right to vote was only nine years old when this movie was made. It sure shows. I'm not a big feminist (is any male, really?), but I was grinding my teeth whenever the question, "Oh, Darling, won't you be mine?" was asked. Today, it's a quaint notion, but at that time, the idea that a man could own a woman was accepted without any raised eyebrows. I found the love affair between the two leads simply not credible; it had no traction. One couldn't imagine happening today what the Shearer character decides with respect to her new lover -- and we're seemingly so much more sophisticated these days. Ah, 'tis a queer, ironic world. A technical note: If the couple was on Lake Michigan when the storm blew up, somebody needed to tell the author that there just ain't that many islands in the lake, and none within an easy row or swim. A little reminiscent of Puccini's opera "Manon Lescaut," the final scene of which takes place in the "Louisiana desert."

The year 1930 was a pretty interesting year for MGM actress Norma Shearer as she became one of the very few people to be up for the Oscar for Best Actor/Actress for two different movies (and thus beating herself as she won for THE Divorcée).The story of THEIR OWN DESIRE is in its bare bones, a melodrama without MGM's excesses and an experiment in sound reflecting the ghost of silent pictures. The movie opens with a crucial event: Henry Marlett (Lewis Stone) is leaving the family in a shocking way – he is divorcing his current wife (Belle Bennett) for another lady, a Ms. Beth Cheever (Helen Millard). Norma Shearer plays the temperamental daughter Lucia "Lally" who can't stand to see her family be separated by this occurrence and grows estranged from him. She soon after meets and falls in love with a young man, played by Robert Montgomery, who happens to be Ms.Cheever's son. Mrs. Marlett of course is outraged at their relationship and teeters on suicide which temporarily separates Jack from Lally, but not for long: they do meet one night in what seems to be a clandestine elopement, and are caught in a raging storm. To the world they have drowned, but her father rushes to find them and bring them back to safety. The film ends as Lally and Jack are back together again.Shearer and Montgomery work well as a romantic couple and would be re-teamed again on two occasions, on PRIVATE LIVES from 1931 and RIPTIDE, from 1934. Here, though, both display a frank youthfulness to their interpretation – they could easily pass for nineteen, which is what their characters portray. Shearer especially is good in her scenes and doesn't totally resort to the posturing that was common of the actors making the transition from silent to talkies, although the moving scene as she wavers in and out of consciousness after the storm, cradling Montgomery's head and half-praying has a silent film quality which regardless, holds well. As does the lovely moment when Shearer and Stone reconcile – there is a genuine, emotional moment that without too much exposition neatly ties the story at its conclusion.THEIR OWN DESIRE has a clunky quality that comes from the type of transition from scene to scene and its script implies more than it states, but nevertheless this is a good movie to sit back and enjoy for a little more than an hour and watch the rising leads play exuberant, privileged young things from the Roaring Twenties.

The movie has a somewhat overheated, strained quality to it, much like a soap opera and is primarily of interest for Norma Shearer's performance, which received a nomination for Best Actress for the 1929-30 Academy Awards, which she lost to herself, winning instead for her performance in The Divorcee, a better role in a much better film. Ms. Shearer was THE actress at the time and did quite well for many years. A good movie that could have been better and largely a curio now.