William K. Howard's This Side of Heaven (1934)

This Side of Heaven is one of the best-crafted films that William K. Howard made of the sixty films he directed between 1916 and 1946,  Many of these films have not survived and even The Power and the Glory, made in 1936 with a script by Preston Sturges and considered an important influence on Citizen Kane, survives only in fragmented form.  Like many of Howard's films This Side of Heaven has a great deal of sympathy for its female characters:  a daughter going to college, another daughter who teaches school, an intelligent housekeeper and a mother who has written a novel and has just received a contract to write screenplays in Hollywood.  The men are weaker and more problematic, including the father who was tricked into embezzlement, a son who only cares about getting into a fraternity and a louse engaged to the teacher who only cares about himself.

The film was written by two women -- Zelda Sears and Eve Green -- and based on a novel by Marjorie Bartholomew Paradis.  It was filmed just before the Production Code was put into effect and includes passionate kissing, premarital sex and two attempted suicides, as it follows the Turner family (Lionel Barrymore, Fay Bainter, Mae Clark, Tom Brown, Mary Carlisle and housekeeper Una Merkel) for 24 hours as each member confronts serious problems while Mrs. Turner gets ready to leave for Hollywood.  Howard and cinematographer Hal Rosson (who worked on his first film in 1916 and his last in 1967) film in crisp black-and-white and use the uncommon swish-pan for telephone conversations and to connect scenes, emphasizing the importance of the family connections and the panic caused by difficulties getting in touch. The screenplay is rich in the slang of the time while relating problems and struggles that are as relevant as ever. The film was obviously not only a considerable influence on the Andy Hardy movies that were soon to come out of the same studio, MGM,  but also on Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946), in which Lionel Barrymore was the bad guy in a similar plot.