Once a Sinner

Plot

Diana Barry, a fashionable New Yorker, gives up her luxurious apartment to move to the small town of Sparta and marry Tommy Mason, a young inventor, turning down an offer of financial help from her wealthy former lover, Dick Kent. Once settled in Sparta, Diana confesses to Tommy that she once had an affair with an older man, but he refuses to learn the man's name or any details, and the couple agree to put the matter behind them.

A year later, Tommy—who has developed a device for transmitting sound and pictures over a telephone line—is invited by an investment corporation to spend three months in New York at its expense while it considers financing his invention. Reluctant to return to the city, Diana agrees to go. There, the corporation's broker, James Brett, champions the invention to the firm's president, who turns out to be Dick Kent. When Diana and Kent are introduced at a dinner-dance, the two pretend to be meeting for the first time, but Tommy is unsettled to realize how many people at the club recognize his wife.

Tommy comes to suspect that Brett, a noted ladies' man, was Diana's former lover, and threatens to withhold his invention if his suspicions prove correct. Diana refuses to tell him about Kent, and over the following months their marriage grows miserable under Tommy's jealousy and badgering. On her birthday, after Brett sends her flowers, Diana finally assures Tommy that Brett was not the man, declares that her past belongs to her alone, and leaves him. When her friend Kitty King invites her to Paris with Kitty's fiancé, Serge Ratoff, Diana reluctantly accepts.

The following spring, having lost her job as a model, Diana is courted by Ratoff, who claims that Kitty has left him and lavishes attention on her. Tommy, though resentful that Kent had financed his invention on Diana's account, sets out to find her and traces her to one of Ratoff's clubs, where Ratoff presses a pearl necklace on her; she refuses it but agrees to wear it for the evening. Barred from the club, Tommy is eventually escorted inside by Ratoff's discarded former mistress. Diana sees the woman kiss Tommy after he gives her money to gamble and, noticing that he has spotted the necklace, concludes that he has come not out of love but to "save" her at Kent's urging. As Diana goes upstairs with Ratoff and a disgusted Tommy prepares to leave, his escort confesses that Ratoff's rejection had once driven her to soliciting men on the streets. Tommy forces his way past Ratoff's bodyguards, interrupts him, apologizes to Diana, and tells her that he loves and needs her, and the two reconcile.

Cast

Dorothy Mackaill as Diana Barry

Joel McCrea as Tommy Mason

John Halliday as Richard Kent

C. Henry Gordon as Serge Ratoff

Ilka Chase as Kitty King

Sally Blane as Hope Patterson

Nanette Faro as Marie

Clara Blandick as Mrs. Mason

Myra Hampton as Mrs. Nolan

George Brent as James Brent