The Barretts of Wimpole Street

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Movie Info

Remarkable poet Elizabeth Barrett (Norma Shearer) is slowly recovering from a crippling illness with the help of her siblings, especially her youngest sister, Henrietta (Maureen O'Sullivan), but feels stifled by the domestic tyranny of her wealthy widowed father, Edward (Charles Laughton). When she meets fellow poet Robert Browning (Fredric March) in a romantic first encounter, her heart belongs to him. However, her controlling father has no intention of allowing her out of his sight.

Genre:

romance
Original Language:

English
Director:

Sidney Franklin
Producer:

Irving Thalberg
Release Date (Streaming):

Mar 17, 2017
Runtime:

1h 50m
Production Co:

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Cast & Crew

Norma Shearer
Elizabeth Barrett

Fredric March
Robert Browning

Charles Laughton
Edward Moulton-Barrett

Maureen O'Sullivan
Henrietta Barrett

Katharine Alexander
Arabel Barrett

Una O'Connor
Wilson

Show all Cast & Crew

Critic Reviews for The Barretts of Wimpole Street

All Critics (9) | Top Critics (3) | Fresh (7) | Rotten (2)

As a film it's slow. Very. The first hour is wandering, planting-the-plot stuff that has some difficulty cementing the interest, but in the final stretch it grips and holds.

March 26, 2009 | Full Review…

Variety Staff
Variety
Top Critic
Sidney Franklin has filmed a drama of beauty, dignity and nobility.

March 25, 2006 | Rating: 4.5/5 | Full Review…

Andre Sennwald
New York Times
Top Critic
Slow, deliberate, dull.

January 26, 2006 | Full Review…

Time Out
Top Critic
Everyone in it is completely vicious, angelic, comic, splendid or nitwitted.

August 1, 2019 | Full Review…

Ann Ross
Maclean's Magazine
An exceptionally charming and frequently moving piece of work.

June 7, 2019 | Full Review…

Helen Brown Norden
Vanity Fair
One of the better-known and more typical of MGM's adaptations of famous stage plays.

January 31, 2012 | Rating: 3.5/4 | Full Review…

TV Guide
Sidney Franklin's Oscar nominated period romance about the titular poets is stiff and stagy, but it offers good roles for Laughton as the tyrannical father and Norma Shearer as his invalid daughter. This version is superior to the later remake.

February 10, 2008 | Rating: B | Full Review…

Emanuel Levy
EmanuelLevy.Com
When not even Charles Laughton, playing a deranged, scarily pious, and pretty obviously incestuous domineering father can save a film, you know you have problems.

December 5, 2004 | Rating: 2/5 | Full Review…

Michael W. Phillips, Jr.
Goatdog's Movies
A typically lush MGM production set in 19th-century London.

May 24, 2003 | Full Review…

Film4 Staff
Film4

View All Critic Reviews (9)

Audience Reviews for The Barretts of Wimpole Street

Dec 01, 2016

The love story between Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett is legendary, and her 'Sonnets from the Portuguese' contains some of the beautiful love poetry ever written. They were both already established poets when they began corresponding, but she was an invalid, and had doubts and insecurities that he helped overcome with steady, persistent, genuine love. What I had forgotten about their story was how poorly her father behaved towards her and the rest of his children, and this movie really shows us that, in what appears to be a pretty accurate way. Charles Laughton is brilliant as the overbearing, controlling, overprotective, borderline incestuous Mr. Barrett, father of 12, whose wife had passed away, and whose own frustrations in love had led him to forbid his children to marry. He's hard to watch at times, but certainly gives the best performance, and the movie is probably more about his inability to let his children go - indeed, he disinherited each one who married - than it is about the extraordinary love between Robert and Elizabeth, though Frederic March and Norma Shearer do have some tender scenes. I enjoyed watching it, but I suppose that's the reason I didn't give a higher rating. How much better would it have been had they incorporated even more of their relationship, and some of their letters and poetry. The movie would be remade 23 years later by the same director, Sidney Franklin, and would be a great choice to be remade (with script changes) again today.

Antonius B Super Reviewer
Jul 15, 2013

A bit on the melodramatic side but I think this was the time period that created the melodrama. Fredric March is seemingly in every film as the leading man and here he performs his duty and gets his maid.

John B Super Reviewer