Sometimes families can be disrupted when a young person has ideas that don’t match the family’s values. One film shows how books can affect a young person’s views on life, and not always in positive ways. “Ah, Wilderness!” (1935) was a very successful MGM film based on Eugene O’Neill’s play of the same name, his only comedy. The film features a star-studded cast, and, while this story is funny at times, it deals with serious subjects that a small-town family faces.
In 1906, Richard Miller (Eric Linden) is about to graduate from high school in a small New England town. He has a lot of radical ideas from reading controversial books, and he shares them with his sweetheart, Muriel McComber (Cecilia Parker). Richard’s father (Lionel Barrymore), a newspaperman, tries to keep an open mind about his son’s new ideas, but he worries that they will get him into trouble.
