Gladys George left Richard Dix nineteen years ago. He couldn't hold a job, drank, and the Great Novel he was working on was going nowhere. Now she is married to George Zucco, and Miss George's child with Dix is grown to be Richard Greene, about to go off to the college where his elders all went. A friendship with professor Roland Young and his daughter, Brenda Joyce, leads Greene to Dix.

Father and son help each other grow. Dix quits the booze and gets a job on a newspaper. Dix's attitude towards people knocks the snobbery out of Greene. It all comes to a head when David is in the car when a fellow college student strikes and kills a woman, and David is expected to lie to protect a member of his class, while Russell Gleason, who's working his way through college, will take the rap.

It's a fine cast under the direction of Roy Del Ruth working on a good script. Richard Dix, as he does whenever he gets a chance to actually act, is superb; Roland Young is wonderful (of course) and Brenda Joyce gets a fine part as the unlikely ingenue. It's Greene who gives a performance that is an eye-opener: not so much in the way he speaks his lines, but in the way he moves just like Dix does.