Stella Dallas

One of the silent era’s most popular and moving melodramas, the beautifully mounted original screen version of Olive Higgins Prouty’s oft-filmed novel was adapted by Frances Marion and produced by Samuel Goldwyn. An extraordinarily touching Belle Bennett stars as the everywoman heroine Stella, a small-town girl who moves up in the world when she marries the upper-crust Stephen Dallas (Ronald Colman), with whom she soon has a daughter. But a blue-blood marriage can’t change Stella’s coarse ways, leading to a wrenching choice between her daughter’s happiness and her own.