Amnesia is perfunctory in this "pre-Code" melodrama. Comes and goes without much stress.
Rich snotbucket monocle-wearing attorney Charlie "Beauty" Steele is beaten, thrown into a river and presumed dead. He is rescued and wakes up without a glimmer of memory but is otherwise entirely functional. In his new, raccoon-skin-hat personality he falls in love with shopkeeper Rosalie Eventural (played by 18-year-old Loretta Young). Eventually it comes to light that he has left a wife behind. His memory returns in flash and in a flashback, and things go from bad to worse. Bigamy and all that.
The Right of Way has not aged well. It's a silent film with words. Conrad Nagel, acting in a superseded tradition, is all exaggerated gestures, eye rolls, and heavy lipstick. Loretta Young is so young that she hasn't even started to look like Loretta Young.
Astonishing to think that the film is now pushing a hundred years old and that amnesia was there right from the start. Before the start, actually, because there were two silent Right of Ways (or Rights of Way) before this all-talkie version.
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