(There are Spoilers) Heart wrenchingly effective 1930's tear-jerker that grabs you right from the start and never lets go until the ending credits. With you hoping some way that for once, no matter how corny and unbelievable, that there will be a Hollywood-style happy ending. 25 year-old Barbara Stanwyck plays the young librarian Lulu Smith who just had enough of the dull and boring country life that she's been leading and decides to take her life savings, $1,200.00,and go on a Caribbean cruise.<br /><br />Meeting this middle-aged man Bob Grover, Adolphe Menjou, when he got his cabin room mixed up with hers Lulu ends up spending her vacation time in Havana with Bob who together paint the town red. Back in the states the two fall madly in love with each other but when it comes to tie the knot Bob has a confession to make to Lulu. The fact is that he's not only married but involved in the states politics where leaving his crippled and loving wife Helen, Dorothy Peterson, would destroy his political career. In one of the most amazing and explosive scenes involving a breakup of a couple Lulu practically throws Bob out of her apartment as he, knowing that he's the guilty party, pleads for forgiveness telling an hurt and outraged Lulu that his door will always be opened to her.<br /><br />Time marches on as Bob becomes the states elected Attorney General. Lulu alone and almost homeless has Bob's baby, Roberta, whom she at first refuses to see in the maternity ward because the child reminds her of him. Still holding a flame for Lulu Bob tracks her down and finds out that she's alone, living with her and his three year-old daughter Roberta. He then continues his secret and illicit affair with her where at the same time puts on a false face, to the public, that he's a happily married man. <br /><br />The bottom falls out of both Bob and Lulu's secret relationship when the sleaze-ball editor of that yellow rag "The Record" Al Holland, Ralph Bellamy, spots little Roberta with Lulu. Bob who's political career, for some reason or another, Holland's determined to destroy and smells, with the rat-like instincts that he has, a big and provocative story at Bob Grover's expense. Being told by Lulu, whom the creep secretly has the hots for, that she's the governess of Roberta who's Bob and Helen's adopted daughter Holland go back to his office to get the truth about just who little Reborta is. This has her real mother Lulu, who get a job at the paper as it's lovelorn communists, go check out the mothers background which just happens to be herself!<br /><br />In the end the you know what hits the fan with Bob, even though he's dying from an incurable and unnamed illness, getting elected governor of the state. Holland whom Lulu married, in order to keep the slime ball from exposing her and her and Bob's 19 year-old daughter Roberta, gets the official hospital records that his wife Lulu is both Roberta's mother and that Bob is her dad. Even more explosive Roberta was the results of an illicit affair between the two! Instead of acting like a normal and feeling human being and keeping it all quite Holland runs out as if his pants were on fire to get the big story to hit the streets, via his paper, that morning. Instead the lowlife creep gets blasted by his now totally hysterical, from him beating her up and about to expose Roberta, wife Lulu.<br /><br />Really touching final with a dying governor Bob Grover pardoning his lover and mother of his daughter Lulu from a life-sentence, for gunning down Al Holland, and leaving half of his estate in her name. Lulu now old and with her deciding to keep the truth from Roberta, as well as the widowed Mrs. Grover, to herself and alone in the world does whats best for everyone. Not wanting to destroy Bob's reputation, by him being a man who cheated on his wife, Lulu both honorably and unselfishly tears up Bob's hand written last will and testament, throwing it in a city garbage can as he movie ends.<br /><br />Schmaltzy yet powerful film about a love that wasn't meant to be. In the end it showed those involved in it, Lulu & Bob, that the truth as painful as it would be, like Castor or Cod Liver oil, would have been the best medicine to cure it. The truth in the end would have saved both their lives, and ironically even Bob's wife Helen, from the destruction that was to later engulf them by keeping it a secret.