text: How anyone can praise this crude film version after seeing the marvelous WATERLOO BRIDGE with Vivien Leigh and Robert Taylor, is beyond comprehension.<br /><br />MAE CLARKE's Myra is a far cry from the role as played by VIVIEN LEIGH in the remake. She plays a common American girl with a Brooklyn accent and the "Yeah" responses are a bit jarring when one is expecting a less coarse character. DOUGLASS MONTGOMERY (billed in final credits as KENT DOUGLASS) is wildly improbable as a soldier smitten with her no matter how many times she lets him down. BETTE DAVIS has a nothing role in a bit part.<br /><br />Their melodramatic confrontations during the last twenty minutes of the film are beyond belief (extravagant bits of overacting)--even given the fact that this is a cruder version of the story when sound was only a few years old and silent acting was still the rage.<br /><br />Just awful. And it ends abruptly with Clarke losing her life during a bombing on the bridge. The End.<br /><br />It has none of the beautifully shaded performances in the MGM remake of 1940, including a sterling supporting cast. Instead, this one is mounted with low-budget production values (and I mean a shoe-string budget) with no subtlety at all. And there's no pre-code braveness in the scene where Myra tells the aristocratic lady why she must not marry her son, Roy. She simply says, "I picked him up on Waterloo Bridge." Explanation over. Nothing bold there.<br /><br />Summing up: For once, the original is not the best version by any means. VIVIEN LEIGH and ROBERT TAYLOR have never been surpassed as Myra and Roy in the tender, exquisitely acted 1940 film classic.