AllMovie

The upstart Warner Bros. took a whack at Edith Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1920 novel about an American-born countess (Beverly Bayne) whose estrangement from her brutish Polish husband (Stuart Holmes) becomes a cause for celebration in her socially prominent New York family. The flamboyant countess takes up with the fiancée (Elliot Dexter) of her cousin, and together they lead a Bohemian life. Hoping to forget the countess, the young man marries the wall-flower cousin (Edith Roberts). Soon enough, the new bride is expecting, and her philandering husband repents. The Age of Innocence) marked a comeback of sorts for Bayne and Dexter, both fast fading stars of the past decade. The Age of Innocence was filmed again in 1934, with Irene Dunne as the countess and the underrated Julie Haydon as the cousin, and, perhaps even more memorably, in a sumptuous 1993 production directed by Martin Scorsese and featuring Michelle Pfeiffer, Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder.