The Wedding Night

Tony Barrett, a married writer trying to finish a novel at his country house in Connecticut, meets Manya, the daughter of a neighbouring farmer. Manya is reluctantly engaged to Frederik, the man her family has picked. When a snowstorm shuts the two of them in the same house overnight, the town starts talking. The next day Manya's father insists the wedding go ahead. Directed by King Vidor, the film was Samuel Goldwyn's last attempt to make Anna Sten a star in America; it did not work, and Sten's Hollywood career ended here. What the film is really about is the distance between an immigrant community's own rules and the carelessness of an outsider. Gary Cooper plays the writer and Anna Sten plays Manya. The closing is unusually hard for its period.