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In her earliest feature film to have survived, Norma Talmadge suffers nobly in the established manner of 1916: hands wringing, bosom heaving, and with a strained look of utter despair on her still rather pudgy but beautiful countenance. Oddly, she is not at the center of things in this film. That dubious distinction belongs instead to an impossibly young and rather svelte Eugene Pallette as the errand husband and Jewel Carmen as the vamp who leads him to his destruction. The latter was reputedly just as dangerous offscreen as on, but emerges here as rather awkward and not a little ridiculous. The fault, though, may be tied to directors Sidney Franklin and Chester Franklin, who did better with the children of the title (and would go on to do a fine series of kiddie films for Fox) and with an exciting finale which had said children trapped in a burning shack. Talmadge, meanwhile, appears increasingly glum and is not aided much by William Hinckley, who, as her erstwhile lover, would rather go to jail than besmirch her reputation. Hinckley, who two years later became a victim of the terrible post-World War I influenza epidemic, is handsome and debonair, but, like Talmadge, is given little to do other than look worried. An obvious programmer, Children in the House is hardly representative of Norma Talmadge, one of the silent era's most gracious stars, but here completely lost in a potboiler in dire need of focus.