What happened to the girl that night?

I though that maybe the boy friend's wife got wind of what was going on, but I like the night club raid angle you came up with.

My guess is that whatever transpired was deliberately left to the viewer to fill in whichever blanks they wished - perhaps the older man took her for an "overnight" in Atlantic City, which would have been a violation of the Mann act - but it really didn't matter what the details were, which I consider to be reflective of the level of sophistication of the film, and its respect for that of audiences.

There was some pretty ahead-of-its-time stuff in this picture, both stylistically and thematically; for example, the attitudes of the grown children (you could certainly understand their points of view and priorities) and the willingness of the screenwriters to make the parents less-than-completely sympathetic characters, at least to the point of displaying the mother's passive-aggressive tendencies and the father's stubbornness.

Victor Moore's mannerisms were probably one of those things viewers either liked or didn't; they were constant throughout his work, and were part of his persona, much in the same way that Woody Allen is always who he is in each of his pictures. I thought this was among Moore's - as well as Bondi's - finest work.

Another guess: one would have to be either heartless, callous or simply have to make a conscious effort not to become choked up at the final scene. I don't think this was done simply to emotionally manipulate the audience; rather to reinforce the message, which would have been diluted had there been a last-minute tying up of all loose ends in a "happy ever after" resolution.


Poe! You are...avenged!

I assumed they just got caught having sex. Remember she's 17 and in those days for any unmarried female, much less 17, to be known to have had sex was considered a huge scandalous dishonor to not just her, but her whole family. It seems incredibly stupid and doesn't make any sense by today's mores, but that was 1937 and that's the way it was. But also because it was 1937 they couldn't just directly say that in the movie.

My guess (after just seeing the movie, which is a truly great tear jerker that still packs a punch) is that her 35 year old bf was married. There's a scene just before we see Mom and Grandma talking about her not coming home, of what appears to be a hotel room with 2 unmade beds, and a woman's night gown? thrown across one of them. The implication is that she stayed in the hotel room with him that night. Later on when the mother is talking to her hubby I believe he mentions that Mrs. So and So is keeping Rhoda's name out of it - I'm assuming some divorce action. Rhoda was what we used to call a tramp ;)

I actually read a book about films of this time period, and the original script for this movie made it very clear that the girl spent the night with a married man in a hotel room and the next day, the wife called and threatened to release the story to the papers (thereby ruining the girls reputation). At that time, films were carefully censored to ensure there was no 'loose sex' or 'adultery' going on.

The censors disallowed adultery in the sense that you couldn't come out and say 'This young girl had sex sex with a married man', so it was all rendered rather elliptically. Frankly, I had to watch the movie a few times to figure out what exactly was said during the phone call that the grandmother took (it was from the mans wife)