My Daughter Joy
1950 film by Gregory Ratoff

My Daughter Joy is a 1950 British drama film directed by Gregory Ratoff and starring Edward G. Robinson, Peggy Cummins and Richard Greene. It was written by Robert Thoeren and Wiliam Rose. The screenplay concerns a millionaire who spoils his only daughter, but has a strained relationship with his wife.
The film is a loose adaptation of the 1929 novel David Golder by Irène Némirovsky, which had previously been made into in the 1931 French film of the same title. It was released in the United States by Columbia Pictures.
Plot
George Constantin is a financier, a self-made man who started as a shoeshine boy and is now a financial genius. He dotes on his only daughter Georgette, known as Joy. She falls for a young American reporter who writes an exposé of her father's business affairs. Constantin subsequently discovers that Joy is not really his daughter, and he becomes insane.
Constantin's business partners,Mc Tavish and Fogarty,are extremely nervous about the long-shot business deal they have been backing with their millions--which depends solely on the opinions of one eccentric scientist,Professor Keval.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “My Daughter Joy” is 1950 film by Gregory Ratoff. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Daughter, film and Gregory, not as a finished interpretation.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q12126382. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1950, 1929 and 1931.
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This entry incorporates text from “My Daughter Joy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.