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“I was born hooched!”
-Sadie Thompson
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1932 - US
Director
Lewis Milestone
Starring
Joan Crawford, Walter Huston
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I don’t know if you could call it a good performance in any strict sense of the word, but this is definitely one of my favorite Crawford turns as Sadie Thompson, a hilariously foul-mouthed hooker and drifter who “just like[s] to keep friends with everybody.” Walter Huston is frankly terrifying as the fire-and-brimstone preacher descending into madness and determined to save Sadie’s soul. In saving her soul, he strips her of it; the transformation is devastating. Between its rather dark and daring message and fast, mannered wit — and of course, drag queen inspiration Sadie herself — it’s easy to see how this has achieved cult status. Praise, I love pre-code women.
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“A man’s mother is a man’s mother.”
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1933 - US
Director
John Cromwell
Starring
Irene Dunne, Joel McCrea, Frances Dee, Laura Hope Crew
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I would recommend this highly to anyone with a taste for overwrought melodrama. It plays as high camp today (in an eminently pleasing way) but I would also class it as a fairly sophisticated gothic horror piece. Laura Hope Crews eats up the scenery as a mother with a special relationship with her two “big boys.” She has built herself up as a paragon of womanhood and has a morbid romantic attachment to them. Their adoration for her is likewise perverse. It’s not just a matter of no other woman is good enough for my boys so come, let me clutch you to my bosom; talk of pregnancy or shared bedrooms actually elicits shrieks of horror, and when the girlfriend of the younger son is drowning in a frozen pond her main concern is that he’s not wearing his overcoat. It’s delicious good fun, by turns hilarious and horrifying. Dunne’s the “lady scientist” who gets roped into the madness by pregnancy. Bizarre and overtly sexual.
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1939 - US
Director
Wesley Ruggles
Starring
Irene Dunne, Fred MacMurray
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This is less absorbing, or quite possibly, I’m not able to get as silly over Fred MacMurray. Intermittently compelling relationship-turned-family drama about a boxer and a rich girl who fall in love, are baffled by class issues, learn the value of sacrifice. I think though I’m willing to forgive a lot for old-timey romances when I have a crush on at least one of the principals, at minimum, that the thing that keeps two people apart (the requisite narrative force in a romantic comedy or drama, after all) has to make sense. Here again, it doesn’t really, but there are some moving moments, particularly to do with the son who grows up not knowing, and not particularly loving, his title-seeking father. All that’s rather well done, and I don’t generally care for kids in cinema. Anyway, mixed bag, but it’s harmed in my girlish opinion by casting MacMurray instead of Grant, Boyer or Montgomery (none of whom, all right, should play boxers, but I’m into whatever).
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1939 - US
Director
John Stahl
Starring
Irene Dunne, Charles Boyer
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I watch these things & I can actually feel myself regressing into that helplessly romantic little girl who faked sick to stay home from school to catch crucial episodes of Days of Our Lives. This is a soap opera on the same level of achievement, with very thin plot, and an unsubstantiated romance one only believes because Dunne & Boyer make dreamy eyes at one another so well. The film is notable for a long hurricane sequence that’s pretty damn impressive for 1939. And eh, the rest of it’s just lovable cheese. I get all angsteh. I’m so easy. I’m so easy.
Barbara O’Neil plays a fairly interesting character, as Boyer’s possibly crazy? maybe just a bitch? wife. This film also boasts the more compelling use of the line “I’ll be back.” ["...in a little while." the angst!] Also, “I’ve fallen desperately in love with you, and I don’t know what we’re going to do about it.” Ugh!
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“I’ve been settled all my life. I’d like to get unsettled.”
-Nancy
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1941 - US
Director
Gregory La Cava
Starring
Irene Dunne, Robert Montgomery, Preston Foster
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Surprisingly pretty good… I didn’t think I had any more particularly good ones ahead of me. Plot is contrived (small-town girl — Dunne either playing WAY below her age or this is just a terribly, terribly late bloomer — chucks Ohio, heads to New York to seek a career — yes, please! — gets picked up by a guy on the train and dumped at the station. She marries his brother; all sorts of complications arise; she falls in love with his brother. Happily ever after!) and half of the contrivances just don’t make sense (ie, all the “unfinished business” ..business). But it’s lovely, a charmer, frequently funny, and I probably have to get my head examined after seeing so many of these and knowing the formula too well, but I still get caught up in the romantic tension of it all and feel fully the climactic resolution. I’m entirely too easy.
By the way, this is true, and a serious characterization problem:
“Miss Dunne, even though she must combine the naivete of Cinderella with devastating wit of Dorothy Parker, is charming.”
-NY Times
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“Say it’s a bit nippy tonight, you’ll make a right proper little water bottle!”
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1935 - US
Director
George Cukor
Starring
Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Brian Aherne
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I’ve been looking forward to this film pretty much as long as film has been an important part of my life. Film love started with Hepburn and Grant, and here of course is their first collaboration. It didn’t disappoint; the first hour of it is hilarious and energetic, full of delightful gender confusion. Kate is actually fairly convincing as a boy, a prep school dandy of a boy, which comes as a shock in the moments when one can look through her iconic voice and face; Cary is really great in what comes across as a fairly brilliant study of “Archie doing Cary doing what an American would think is Cockney.” It’s a bit shocking for the Code, scandalous at the time for Kate’s “girl”-on-girl smooch.
It loses some steam, humor and follow-through on gender trouble in the second half, in which it becomes clear this floppy-headed Errol Flynn wannabe is the actual romantic interest. I don’t care if it’s 1935 and he’s not quite Cary Grant yet; I can’t imagine a romance giving preference to another man than Cary Grant. Does not compute. Anyway, this was well worth the wait, very pleasing, and even quite good for long stretches.
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2006 - France
Director
Omnibus
Starring
Miranda Richardson, Gena Rowlands, Ben Gazzara et al
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When I first heard about this, well over two years ago, I was sure it would be the best film ever made. By the time it came to a theater here, the reviews were so mediocre I had no real desire to spend the money. Gotta love the expectations game.
By the time I got the DVD, I really had no expectations either way, and that left me with a pleasantly enjoyable, but on no level mindblowing, experience. Shorts are of widely varying quality, and I wonder what the big idea was leading off with three of the weakest. But there are some real gems here, a few that manage to say quite a lot in a five-minute window, with highest praise going to Tom Tykwer, Alexander Payne, Nobuhiro Suwa, the Coens, Richard LaGravenese and Isabel Coixet’s segments; many are middling and enjoyable (here I’d class Depardieu’s collaboration with Rowlands & Gazzara), and many awfully forgettable. Some seemed to forget to get the concepts of “Paris” and “love” in. Plenty to fall in love with, the overall effect is quite pleasing, and ultimately this came as a nice surprise.
Don’t know that it matters, but what the hell, I’ll rank the shorts:
BEST
1 - Bastille by Isabel Coixet
2 - Faubourg Saint-Denis by Tom Tykwer
3 - Place des Victories by Nobuhiro Suwa
4 - 14th Arrondisement by Alexander Payne
5 - Tulieres by the Coen Brothers
6 - Pigalle by Richard LaGravenese
GOOD
7 - Quartier Latin by Frederic Auburtin and Gerard Depardieu
8 - Parc monceau by Alfonso Cuaron
9 - Le marais by Gus Van Sant
10 - Loin du 16′eme by Walter Sales and Daniela Thomas
11 - Tour Eiffel by Sylvian Chomet
12 - Place des Fetes by Oliver Schmitz
13 - Pere Lachaise by Wes Craven
14 - Quartier des Enfants Rouges by Olivier Assayas
FORGETTABLE/BAD
15 - Porte de Choisy by Chirstopher Doyle
16 - Montmarte by Bruno Podalydes
17 - Quais de Seine by Gurinder Chadha
18 - Quartier de la madeleine by Vincent Natali
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[La Môme]
2007 - France
Director
Olivier Dahan
Starring
Marion Cotillard, Gerard Depardieu
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What a muddled, nonsensical chronology, fragmented for no discernable purpose, and Dahan’s stylistic choices (as in Vie promise) drive me nuts. What, for example, besides pure affectation, is the point of filming her perhaps biggest starmaking concert without sound? And with no joy whatsover, the viewer is just wrenched from one histrionic tragedy in Piaf’s life to the next. Cotillard does exactly what she’s called upon to do, but all the wailing gets to be a bit too much, a bit one-note, and I’d say she’s worthy of a nomination but I’m not as ready to throw the accolades at her like many are. Anyway, for a biopic I don’t think it’s very effective either in telling the story of a life or presenting a human being.
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1962 - US
Director
Edward Dmytryk
Starring
Barbara Stanwyck, Jane Fonda, Anne Baxter
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I was going to tag this “high camp, low energy” until the last 20 minutes or so when it gets even campier and genuinely exciting. For the payoff, I’d recommend this pretty highly for anyone intrigued by any of the following:
1) Anne Baxter in a wig and thick accent as a Mexican;
2) Jane Fonda running around like a wildcat in her second role, emaciated and yet impossibly curvy, overacting and flailing her arms in a bizarre attempt at a southern accent;
3) A high-class New Orleans “doll house” staffed by all manner of daffy and street-smart dames, policed by various thugs including one who’s lost his legs and locomotes on a makeshift scooter;
4) Above all, yes, run screaming to your video store for Barbara Stanwyck as an almost elderly badass lesbian madam who throws many a tantrum and raises many a villainous eyebrow.
It is great good fun, in these latter days of the Code, to watch them dance around Stanwyck’s character, who is blatantly lesbian, and yet they can’t really give her any lines that quite say so. The script is quite bad whole and entire, but its awkward end runs around the Code are genuinely hilarious. None of the breezy nose-thumbing of the best of the earlier Code films, just a lot of awkward caterwauling. Recommended as a curiosity piece.
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About TLC
Films: All reviewed | Favorites
Actors: Profiles | Favorites
Directors: Profiles | Favorites
All films by year
2008 Viewing log
The Woman Accused 1933, Paul Sloane
So Big! 1932, William A Wellman
The Awful Truth 1937, Leo McCarey
Conquest 1937, Clarence Brown
It’s Love I’m After 1937, Archie Mayo
The Mad Miss Manton 1938, Leigh Jason
Algiers 1938, John Cromwell
The Gay Divorcee 1934, Mark Sandrich
All This, & Heaven Too 1940, Anatole Litvak
Mannequin 1937, Frank Borzage
A short digression on Charles Boyer…
Yes, I am endeared. I am, in fact, ensorceled. His inhumanly arched eyebrows, his little winks and half-smiles, and that ability to at once maintain full control of his material while shining the spotlight on his costar: yes, that is talent; yes, this is love. And no, Cluny Brown, it’s not just the cocktails giving you that persian cat feeling… I think we both know too well it has a bit to do with Mr Charles Boyer. Rawr.
Pre-Code Hollywood
» The Woman Accused 1933 Paul Sloane
» So Big! 1932 William A Wellman
» Pre-Code Icons Gallery #1: Barbara Stanwyck
» A Month of Pre-Code Hollywood
Previous months
30s Cinema
Maestresses
The Lubitsch Race
In-transit romances
Nothing better suited to Hollywood romance than three weeks out of time, away from life, falling in love with a stranger, spending days idly and nights actively.
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If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger...
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