Women Won't Tell
Cast & Crew
Richard Thorpe
Sarah Padden
Otis Harlan
Gloria Shea
Larry Kent
Edmund Breese
Film Details
Technical Specs
Synopsis
A woman lives in the city dump, where, among the refuse, she ekes out a living collecting and selling junk. She finds an abandoned child there and rears the girl with much sacrifice. When the woman learns that a wealthy manufacturer has died and that he has left his estate to his estranged wife, the woman tries to claim the estate so that she can provide for the child, but she is arrested and jailed for perjury. The woman actually is the widow of the manufacturer, who abandoned her because of his ambitions. She is finally exonerated when her friends bring a witness to her trial, who tells of the shotgun wedding in Tennessee of the woman and the manufacturer and explains that he was one of the people holding a shotgun. In the end, it is also learned that the child, rather than being illegitimate, actually was born in wedlock before being abandoned at the dump. The child later develops into a tennis champion.
Director
Richard Thorpe
Cast
Sarah Padden
Otis Harlan
Gloria Shea
Larry Kent
Edmund Breese
Mae Busch
Walter Long
William V. Mong
Robert Ellis
Tom Ricketts
Isabel Withers
John Hyams
Jane Darwell
Dewey Robinson
Donald Kirke
June Bennett
Charles Mailes
Betty Mack
Helen Wills
Crew
Film Details
Technical Specs
Quotes
Trivia
Notes
The working title of this film was The Woman Nobody Knows. According to VarB, the film at the end includes newsreel shots of tennis champion Helen Wills doubling for the child who has grown up to be a tennis champion. Variety, in their review of the film, states that it was "apparantly made because a major company is doing Goose Woman over again." The Goose Woman was a 1925 Universal film based on a Rex Beach story, directed by Clarence Brown and starring Louise Dresser, whose plot and setting bear some similarity to this film in that both feature a woman rearing a child in poverty, and a trial involving a wealthy man (see AFI Catalog of Feature Films, 1921-30; F2.2198). The film to which Variety makes reference was the 1933 RKO production The Past of Mary Holmes.
