The Other Half

Donald Trent learned about class equality in the trenches of the Great War, and wants to live by it when he returns home. Instead of joining the upper echelons of his father’s steel mill, he begins at the bottom, as an ordinary worker. His closest chum there is his war buddy, Corporal Jimmy, and Trent's fiancée Katherine becomes friends with Jimmy’s jazz-mad girlfriend Jennie. But after his father’s death, Donald embraces Trent Sr’s admonishment of “no sentiment in business”. He remains obdurate even when Jimmy is blinded in a workplace accident caused by cost-cutting measures. Katherine, however, has stayed true to her ideals. Together with the workers’ newspaper “The Beacon”, she begins a “battle for democracy” as the (only partially surviving) Dutch version of the film was titled. (Berlinale)