Another Dawn | |
---|---|
Directed by | William Dieterle |
Produced by | Harry Joe Brown |
Written by | Laird Doyle |
Based on | original story by Laird Doyle |
Starring | |
Music by | Erich Wolfgang Korngold |
Cinematography | Tony Gaudio |
Edited by | Ralph Dawson |
Production
company |
Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc.
|
Distributed by | Warner Bros. |
Release date
|
|
Running time
|
73 mins |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Budget | $552,000 |
Box office | $1,045,000 |
Another Dawn (a.k.a. Caesar's Wife) is a 1937 American film melodrama starring Errol Flynn and Kay Francis, based on Somerset Maugham's play Caesar's Wife. The film was directed by William Dieterle.
Colonel John Wister (Ian Hunter) is in charge of a post in the British desert colony of Dickit. While on leave in England he meets and falls in love with the beautiful American Julia Ashton (Kay Francis), whose aviator fiancé died in an aircraft accident. Although Julia does not love John, she likes him and agrees to his marriage proposal.
John takes Julia to Dickit, where she meets John's best friend, Captain Denny Roark (Errol Flynn), and Denny's sister, Grace (Frieda Inescort), who is secretly in love with John. Denny reminds Julia of her dead fiance and the two of them fall in love. John discovers this and although he would give her a divorce, he knows that she is too decent to leave him.
An uprising by local Arabs means one of the soldiers must fly a suicidal bombing mission. Denny volunteers but as he is saying good bye to Julia, John flies off instead, sacrificing his life so that his best friend and wife can be together.
Somerset Maugham's play Caesar's Wife was first performed in 1919 starring C. Aubrey Smith. It concerned Sir Arthur Little, a British consulate agent in Cairo, who married a 19-year-old wife, Violet. Violet likes Little but falls in love with his private secretary, Ronald Perry. The play was filmed in 1928 as Infatuation starring Corinne Griffith.
Warners bought the rights to Caesar's Wife in late 1935. Errol Flynn had just impressed with Captain Blood and was announced as the male lead of Caesar's Wife in February 1936.
In March it was announced Flynn and Bette Davis would co star in Another Dawn and that the film would be set in Iraq with Laird Doyle, who had written Dangerous, doing the script. Doyle would receive an original story credit for the film, with no attribution being given to Maugham, although the film also dealt with a love triangle between two friends and the wife of one of them in a colonial outpost.