King Vidor described his adaptation of Elmer Rice's Pulitzer Prize-winning play as one of his "experiments" like OUR DAILY BREAD and THE CROWD, films from which he did not expect huge box-office numbers. Retaining the play's unities of time and place, the film is set in a lower middle class New York neighborhood during the 1920s. It stars Sylvia Sidney as Rose Maurrant, a young woman whose parents' marriage is heading for disaster. All the neighbors are well aware that her mother (Estelle Taylor) is carrying on with bill collector Steve Sankey (Russell Hopton), but her alcoholic husband, Frank (David Landau), is still in the dark. All that changes when he returns to his apartment by surprise and catches the pair en flagrante. The fallout from this tragedy has a devastating effect on all members of the family, particularly Rose. Vidor powerfully evokes the stifling claustrophobia of young people trapped in such a neighborhood, and as he records the varying reactions of the neighbors to the incident, one feels oneself being enclosed in a prison of prying faces.