Directed by Clarence Brown, the film stars Wallace Beery and features Lionel Barrymore, Eric Linden, Cecilia Parker, Spring Byington, and a young Mickey Rooney.

He already feels worldly wise, thanks to reading Shaw, Wilde, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, Swinburne and Marxist tracts.

Richard's father, newspaper editor Nat Miller, is a kind, wise man.

Richard has three siblings: older brother Arthur home from Yale; sister, Mildred; and Tommy, the youngest.

Sid keeps proposing to Lily, but she refuses, ostensibly because he once got involved with a bad woman; his not-so-secret drinking is the real problem.

Nat turns a burst of applause into a final acclamation, forestalling Richard's planned Marxist call to arms.

"Samples of the new freedom," Nat says, showing Richard's letters to Sid, who reads aloud a stanza from Swinburne's Laus Veneris.

Arthur's friend Wint asks Richard to go on a double date with "a couple of swift babies" that night.

Richard blames women for driving men to drink and marches out to meet Wint.

Richard comes home drunk and miserable, declaiming: "But he does not win who plays with Sin In the secret House of Shame.

Nat and Richard have s serious talk, about the fact that "no woman wants to give her love to a stupid drunk" and about women like Belle, "whited sepulchers" who can "ruin your whole life.