The Young Philadelphians

A genuine 1950s soap-opera melodrama set among the upper-crust of Philadelphia society, this Warner Brothers film comes complete with infidelities, suicides, seductions, ambition, and plenty of skeletons in closets. Newman once again portrays a wholly confident, ambitious, and seductive young man, and his performance saves an otherwise average sudser. The film opens with a prolog set in 1924, in which Brewster, a pretty and ambitious girl from the wrong side of the tracks, jilts her lover, Keith, to marry rich socialite West. Much to the newlyweds' dismay, West proves impotent during the honeymoon. Humiliated, the young millionaire kills himself, leaving Brewster a...