A pair of Irish immigrants arrive in 1850s Wisconsin with nothing but a dream and a baby on the way. And then another baby. And then tragedy strikes. And a baby and more tragedy and another baby and more tragedy and eventually I lost count of both babies and tears. This cheery little melodrama is aimed directly at your tear ducts and it doesn’t really get there that often, at least for me. It’s a bit over the top; well, okay, it’s extremely over the top and it relies a lot of kid performances which are variable, though Patty McCormack of The Bad Seed is on hand as one of the kids and she’s pretty good. The real star here is Glynis John, an actress that I didn’t recall ever seeing before, though upon perusing her filmography I found that I had seen her in small parts in a few movies. As the wife/mother of the central family here, she’s really brilliant and strange and she feels very real as a character in ways that the other characters just don’t. She never quite makes the choice you think she’s going to make in terms of her performance and it makes her character really interesting and kind of odd for a movie of this type. Still, I can’t really recommend this movie. It has some effective moments here and there, but it has a lot of real clunkers too. The ending, in particular, is really stupid or, well, it’s stupidly handled might be a better way to say it. As a plot point, it’s fine, but the movie really bungles the execution. Anyway, a few good performances here, but this one has little else to recommend it. 2 ½ stars.
tl;dr – an excellent central performance from Glynis Johns is about the only thing this movie has going; over-the-top melodrama can work, but it does so only sporadically here. 2 ½ stars.