THE STORY: As told by Walter Kerr in the New York Herald-Tribune, “Nancy Fallon has, some eight years back, run off with a foreign correspondent, leaving a seven-year-old daughter at the mercy of an unloving father. The bitter father has been at work on the child these long years past. Now he is thinking of marrying again, and Bridget is temporarily shipped off to her mother. When Bridget comes, she is a chillingly defensive, arrogantly independent customer. She has been taught that it is most unsophisticated to mention one parent in the presence of the other, she is sure that it is unwise ever to love anyone, and she is eating her heart out in her defiant loneliness.” Bridget’s mother and her new husband are eager to have Bridget remain with them, as are a group of kindly neighbors. Dick and his sister Jane, who live next door, do their best to make friends with Bridget, who insists on remaining aloof. Eventually she succumbs to their genuine friendliness, and is about to go with Dick to a dance when his old girlfriend from out of town turns up and Bridget is left without a date. At the same time she discovers her father’s reasons for sending her on the visit, and the new world she’s begun to build with other people falls apart. However, the love and understanding of her mother and the friends in her new home at last make an impression, and Bridget realizes that she is really wanted here—and that this is where she wants to stay. Dick comes back, aware now that he prefers Bridget to the old girlfriend, and Bridget is at last part of a real family.
“…moving…funny.” —The New York Times.
