Starring Mae Marsh, James Dunn, Sally Eilers, and Olin Howland, the story concerns a young mother who devotedly cares for her children but when they grow up, most of them turn their backs on her and she has no choice but to go live in the poorhouse.

The production marked Marsh's first sound film and the second pairing of Dunn and Eilers, who had achieved celebrity in Fox's Bad Girl released earlier in the year.

[1] Morning in the Shelby house finds Ma trying to wake up her four children – Johnny, Thomas, Isaac, and Susan – and get them ready for school.

Pa dreams about Johnny slaving away in the prison workshop and is overwrought with guilt; he decides to tell Ma that he is really to blame for the crime, but before he can say anything, he dies.

Johnny returns home and is furious when he sees the house for sale and finds out that Isaac, rather than support Ma with the money he sent, allowed her to go to the poorhouse.

[7] The production marked the second film pairing of James Dunn and Sally Eilers, who had achieved celebrity in Bad Girl released earlier in 1931.

[10] Marilyn Harris, who plays Susan Shelby as a child, landed the part after making a favorable impression on the casting director at her interview; he agreed to change the age of the character to accommodate her.

[12] The New York Times wrote that the sound version "is in most respects infinitely more restrained and certainly much better directed and photographed than its highly successful silent predecessor ... and it can boast also of performances that outshine any of those in the old mute work".

[15] The New York Daily News gave the film 2 ½ stars, insisting that the plot, like that of the 1920 silent film, was unconvincing, writing: "Could a family of children be quite so cruel to such a hard-working, loving, sweet, patient, pretty little mother as the petite, white-haired lady of the Will Carleton poem, on which the picture is based?

[15] McCaffrey and Jacobs asserted that Marsh, who had acted extensively in the silent era for D. W. Griffith and other filmmakers, showed herself to be "a sensitive and realistic performer in the sound medium".

[20] A contemporary review by Magill's Cinema Annual 1983 calls the film "memorable for a superb performance by Mae Marsh".

[20] The Film Daily complimented director Henry King for "making every scene in the picture live and breathe with humanness, and never overplaying his hand".

[19] Il Cinema Ritrovato notes some of the technical innovations that King brought to this early sound picture, writing: He was never constrained by the [sound-recording] technology at all.

Rather, in an act of experimentation, he made films with continual camera movements, achieving the most astounding results in Over the Hill, whose opening shots rank as some of King's most mythic images of country life.

[22]Similarly, Chung and Diffrient note that King touts the new sound technology for this Victorian-era story in the very first scene, showing dawn rising over the farmhouse to the accompaniment of roosters crowing loudly.

Chung and Diffrient assert that proof of Over the Ridge's status as a remake of the 1931 film rather than as an adaptation of the original Carleton poems is seen by their similar visual cues, such as the son kicking away his mother's scrub bucket as he rescues her from the poorhouse.

"on the downward slope to obsolescence"—in favor of expressing "an optimistic determination to surmount any obstacle on the path to national recovery", as if to say, "Hope lies just over that hill".