Customer Reviews

Madame X [VHS]

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LA FEMME X, that glorious old potboiler of thwarted mother love, served as a triumphant vehicle for everyone from Sarah Bernhardt to Tuesday Weld (!!!), but no version plucks at the heartstrings more effectively than the Gladys George starrer. Remembered by many moviegoers for her nightclub moll in THE ROARING TWENTIES, George had rare leading roles in this film and her Oscar-nominated VALIANT IS THE WORD FOR CARRIE, and she really brings home the bacon here. Perhaps a trifle world-weary for the straying matron and dispossessed wife at the picture's beginning, she's perfect for the gin-soaked wandering years mid-film, and incredibly moving in her final scenes. A rock would shed tears at Madame X's fate; Gladys George embraces and transcends the melodrama inherent in this role and makes it something human and real and aching. If you like weepers, lay in a big supply of Kleenex before you pop this one in the VCR.

seeing Gladys George start off in this movie as the wife of a wealthy French lawyer, since the only other two times I'd seen her, she was far less lofty: she's the Woman Who REALLY Loves James Cagney's Eddie Bartlett in "The Roaring Twenties" and has a much smaller role as Dana Andrews' broken down stepmother in "The Best Years of Our Lives" . So here, she's the unfaithful wife who must leave her home never to return in order to protect her husband's career and her son's place in society. Warren Williams turns in an appropriately starchy performance as her unsympathetic husband, but it's Henry Daniell who really steals the show as a dastardly fellow blackmailing Madame X about her real identity. Not bad at all.