During a zeppelin air raid, Myra meets Roy (Kent Douglass), an earnest and attractive Canadian soldier. Both are originally from the United States and hit it off. Roy falls in love quickly but Myra, who purports to be the chorus girl she once was, refuses to marry Roy. She feels she is unworthy of her ardent lover.
Nonetheless, the persistent Roy manages to place her on his family's British estate. Myra meets his family, which consists of elderly, blustering, and hard-of-hearing Major Wetherby (Frederick Kerr); his much younger wife Mary (Enid Bennett); and her young but grown daughter Janet (Bette Davis, in an early supporting role). Janet is the stepdaughter of the Major and Roy's sister.
The family is charming and nice to Myra, but Mary nonetheless lets Myra know that she disapproves of any marriage. The angst-ridden Myra confesses she is a prostitute to the nonplussed Mary, who keeps her secret.
Myra then runs away, but because it is a movie, Roy hunts her down for the third and fourth time. By now aware of her true profession, his love is undiminished and he coaxes her into agreeing to marriage. A tragedy then puts a stopper on the story.
The movie was later remade as a 1940 version starring Vivien Leigh, and as the 1956 film Gaby, starring Leslie Caron.
How others will see it. Waterloo Bridge was filmed under budget by Whale. The movie was profitable but not a major success. It received no award nominations, but time has subsequently been kind to it. Director Whale received fame shortly thereafter with Frankenstein, and Mae Clarke soon attained notoriety when James Cagney pushed a grapefruit in her face in The Public Enemy. The superior 1940 remake also cast attention to its lesser predecessor.
Today at imdb.com, has a respectable user rating of 7.6 and a reasonable user vote total of 1626. Women over 45 grade it slightly higher, at 7.9 out of 10. Those who enjoy tearjerker love stories, but don't take them too seriously, may favor this early talkie. Those who decide the characters of Myra, Roy, and Mary are less than credible will roll their eyes but likely find the movie nonetheless engaging.
How I felt about it. Waterloo Bridge was made six decades before Pretty Woman, the most notable blockbuster in which the handsome wealthy lead marries a woman he knows to be a prostitute. By 1990, prostitution as portrayed in cinema had become a dating service for the robber baron class. Such an attitude was unthinkable even in pre-code Hollywood, during a decade in which audiences were shocked to hear Clark Gable utter the word "damn" onscreen.
Thus, Myra cannot tell Roy she is a hooker. The revelation would, and certainly should (at least in her mind), send Roy flying from the room, never to return. It never occurs to her that the wealthy man who pays for sex (something that Roy offers to do early in their relationship, via covering the rent) cannot logically be placed in a superior moral position to the destitute woman who takes him up on the offer.
We must consider Myra from a 1931 perspective. That is, she is several levels in class beneath that of Roy, and thus marriage is somewhere between unworkable and inconceivable. If Myra was instead a wealthy young war widow, she would be acceptable to Mary even if she hired servants that attended to her private needs.
Myra is the 1931 stereotype of the virtuous woman forced into prostitution by poverty. Her nature hasn't changed, only her profession. Roy is also a stereotype, the besotten young man who thinks only of rescuing his feminine find from her tenuous and drab tenement flat. If he takes a bullet on the French front lines, his last thoughts will be how the news of his death will affect Myra.