Al borde de la quinta avenida

There was very little info available on this film, and I had never heard of it, but found it very watchable, packed with interwoven stories of various boarders in a rooming house... and a bit of a tear jerker. Despite billing, Dorothy Tree is the 'star', a chorus line dancer with a problem..she's pregnant and unmarried..and considering the time of the film, this is all very open (although the 'p' word isn't spoken). She hopes upon his return, the fellow she loves, Wallace Ford, will marry her, but when he brings home a frilly southern belle wife, Tree is crushed. Harry Holman plays a con-man, who promises Lucien Littlefield hair growth and his landlady, Maude Eburne, a turtle that doubles in size every week (if fed a secret diet he will give her if she forgets his back rent). The hair falls out, the turtle does grow (it doesn't really, this is kind of funny), and Ford's bride becomes smitten by a would-be overly dramatic novelist, Walter Byron.

The pace is quick, and there isn't a wasted scene, but at the heart of the multiple individual melodramas is the 'calm' of an elderly couple-- Walter Connolly and Louise Carter..just weeks from their 50th anniversary, and dreaming of returning to England one more time to a home they finally own. The other boarders are like children they never had, and they see and accept all their shortcomings. The ending is bittersweet, hard lessons are learned, and through death comes new understandings.