1933 US Dir Paul Sloane Cast Nancy Carroll, Cary Grant, John Halliday, Jack La Rue IMDb
Mostly a retread of the more polished Letty Lynton, stars adorable Nancy Carroll as a woman with a sexual past that comes back to haunt her current romance (with a young, still-developing Cary Grant). I won’t spoil any of the proceedings, but if you are familiar with Letty, she deals with her dangerously obsessive ex similarly, ends up similarly, and goes on a luxury cruise in the meantime similarly. Mostly engaging throughout, but ends with… simply the most shocking thing I have seen in pre-Code cinema. No, I don’t mean Nancy Carroll’s frequently exposed bare back. No, I don’t mean delightfully revealing exchanges like this:
Jeffrey Martha, be sweet and get out. I want to talk to Glenda — alone. Martha In here? Glenda Of course! Now, Martha, don’t tell me that when you were a girl ladies didn’t entertain gentlemen in their bedrooms. Martha Yes, but they married them first. I’ll be here waiting. A scream will bring me. Glenda A scream? From whom? Martha Well the way things are going nowadays it’d be hard to tell which one would scream first. I’ll come whichever calls.
That’s all par for the course. This is something else entirely — shocking in part because it involves Cary Grant, who does play his usual suave charmer in the film, but also just… not what you expect to see in a 1933 film. I can’t do it justice by telling it, so if you don’t mind the spoiler see it for yourself:
Mercifully truncated Edna Ferber adaptation gives the episodic life story of Selina Peake, who suffers the early loss of her parents and then her spouse, sees beauty in cabbage fields and forges an asparagus empire, inspires lust in preteen lost souls, and generally perseveres through all manner of adversity with the inherited philosophy that life is, after all, “only so much velvet.” If the plot is so dull, it is enlivened considerably by the work of Stanwyck and Wellman. The “so big” of the title — which makes this sound like broad comedy; it is not — refers to the playful question Selina poses to her growing son: “How big is my boy? How big is my son?” to which he responds, spreading his arms wide, “So big!” Years later, aged but still scrappy, she asks him again in a tender moment, and hilariously her adult son spreads his hands about ten inches apart and declares himself “so big!” Lending more pre-Code credentials is Bette Davis in a small role as the modern girl who works hard and populates her nightlife with questionable characters. Reflecting upon her ideal man, she avows: “I’ll probably marry some horny-handed son of toil, and if I do, the horny hands’ll win me.”
“[Barbara Stanwyck was] destined to be beloved by all directors, actors, crews and extras. In a Hollywood popularity contest she would win first prize hands down.” -Frank Capra
Funny to think the nicest woman in Hollywood was the very same who romped through the early 30s as a “party girl,” a woman who sleeps her way up the corporate ladder, and most reliably as the tough, straight-talkin’, hard-on-her-luck gal; she is the actress whose films are most cited as hastening the Hays Code crackdown. However sweet she may have been behind the scenes, her onscreen persona ranges from the savage to the seductive, delivered with equally fearless enthusiasm. Always surprising, always delightful, Stanwyck most definitely had “IT.”
Missy passes her leg test.
Baby Face (1933)
Ten Cents a Dance (1931), with Ricardo Cortez
The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933)
Illicit (1931)
Illicit (1931), with Natalie Moorhead & Joan Blondell
Forbidden (1932), with Adolphe Menjou & Ralph Bellamy
Another new feature. Because, when getting back into the swing of things after a long break from writing anything at all, it’s always a good idea to take on more than one has ever successfully juggled before.
Anyway, Pre-Code Hollywood! That glorious second coming of the studio system, the brief but bountiful period between the rise of talkies and the crackdown on “morality” that came with the enforcement of the Hays Code in July 1934. For a few years, gangsters got away with murder, husbands and wives slept in the same bed when times were good and cheated wildly when times were bad, and once in a while gay and interracial relationships were considered openly. It was a great time for women in Hollywood, both for actresses who made up a far greater proportion of the star pool and more often than not commanded top billing, and for the characters they played. Real women with real problems were given sympathetic treatment, the same issues that would be ignored, denied or deeply coded just a few years later: premarital sex, abortion, child abandonment, prostitution, the plight of the working girl, on and on. Characters were not so easily identified as bad and good, and ultimately punished or rewarded accordingly.
It was a time of acclimation to new technology: sure the rise of sound seems to be responsible for quelling the formal experimentation that had barely begun in the realm of silent cinema; many directors favored a plant-and-shoot method and theatrical blocking. But plenty of talented guys — and one lone woman — did interesting work with what they were given: William Wellman, Frank Capra, Rouben Mamoulian, Clarence Brown, Dorothy Arzner to name a few. And while many plots were hackneyed and pictures were churned out as if on a factory line, this was also a great period for screenwriters, with many scripts as bright and fast-paced as any screwball comedy to follow and twice as blunt.
Over the course of the next month, I’m going to try to make as large a dent in the following list as I can. I encourage you to recommend your favorites, and offer any pre-Code points of interest you’d like to share, here or as we go along!
Applause 1929, Mamoulian
Bed of Roses 1933, La Cava
The Bitter Tea of General Yen 1933, Stanwyck/Capra
Bombshell 1933, Fleming
Born to Be Bad 1933, Grant/Sherman
The Cabin in the Cotton 1932, Davis/Curtiz
Dance, Fools, Dance 1931, Crawford/Beaumont
Female 1932, Chatterton
Forbidden 1932, Stanwyck/Capra
A Free Soul 1931, Shearer/Brown
Hell’s House1932, Davis
Heroes for Sale 1933, Wellman
Hot Saturday 1931, Shearer/Brown
I’m No Angel 1932, Grant
Impatient Maiden 1932, Whale
Kept Husbands 1931, Bacon
The Love Trap 1929, Wyler
Man of the World 1931, Lombard,Powell
The Man Who Played God 1932, Davis
Mata Hari 1931, Garbo
Millie 1931, Dillon
The Miracle Woman 1931, Stanwyck/Capra
The Most Dangerous Game 1932, Wray
Night Nurse 1931, Stanwyck/Wellman
No Man of Her Own 1932, Lombard,Gable/Ruggles
Of Human Bondage 1934, Davis/Cromwell
The Office Wife 1930, Bacon
Platinum Blonde 1931, Capra
The Public Enemy 1931, Wellman
Red-Headed Woman 1932, Boyer
The River 1929, Borzage
The Saturday Night Kid 1929, Bow,Arthur
She Done Him Wrong 1933, Grant/Sherman
So Big! 1932, Stanwyck,Davis/Wellman
The Song of Songs 1933, Mamoulian/Dietrich
The Story of Temple Drake 1933, Hopkins
Street Angel 1929, Borzage
This is the Night 1932, Grant
Three on a Match 1932, Davis
The Unholy Three 1930, Conway
Waterloo Bridge 1932, Davis/Whale
The Wild Party 1929, Arzner
The Woman Accused 1933, Grant
Some notes on the occasion of a distracted viewing in the neighborhood of my 100th.
I haven’t had much to say about anything lately — delighting some devious characters who frequent this blog; increasingly disturbing to me — but it has at least afforded me the opportunity to do some much-needed behind-the-scenes tidying and an overall redesign. Typically, when I settle in to spend hours mindlessly updating this and that, I put on a tape of old TCM broadcasts and rewatch the screwball comedies that most delight me. They make for great idle background noise, and as someone who doesn’t generally enjoy rewatching films, I find a lot of them stand up to repeat casual examination very well.
But when The Awful Truth comes up in the cycle… it’s just not something I can watch casually, or glance up at once every ten minutes. It’s so rich, so densely suffused with little moments of honesty and subtle comic gestures, that I can never really give it anything but my full attention. For non-stop hilarity and cinematic genius give me Bringing Up Baby every time. But for deep and candid human understanding, covering the truer-to-life spectrum from playful sparring to awkward silences to heartfelt yearning, no one and nothing approaches the team of McCarey, Grant and Dunne.
One day I fully intend to give this film the treatment it deserves (and that my embarrassing viewing history demands, as justification), but for now I’ll just marvel at a couple moments that struck me this time.
Every romantic comedy requires a reason to keep two lovers apart until the final moments, but here there is not a contrivance among the parade of little misunderstandings and willful acts of self-sabotage that bring Lucy and Jerry Warriner within sixty seconds of the finalization of their divorce. So rare for a screwball comedy (a genre I certainly admire for its feeling of making it up as it goes along — and this one was partially improvised!), the actions and changes of heart are always perfectly in line with what one learns about their characters within the first ten minutes: these are the smug idle rich, the champagne cocktail-sipping urban elite, who don’t take much of anything very seriously; they married on a whim after a quarrel at a pet shop, and will just as lightly divorce one another for sport caring for little other than who shall gain custody of the dog, Mr “Asta” Smith. Yes, life is a game, and whether or not their respective suspicions of infidelity are true (loose ends the film rather brilliantly refuses to tie up — neither one’s name is cleared, really) it’s plain both are quite comfortable lying to the other until they’re caught… orange-handed? (Bad.) They’re frivolous, scheming, proud, smarter than anyone in the room (so that, quite frequently, they seem to talk in a sort of code of inside jokes and meaningful glances that sail right over others’ heads) and obvious to all but themselves, of course, made for one another.
The film runs just short of BUB’s manic pace, and every incident that proceeds from their flighty rush to divorce court is believable, resulting variously in moments of comedic perfection and unexpectedly bracing romantic longing (at peaks, it achieves both), and it’s as cynical as it is honest, despite screwball-silly underpinnings — naturally Lucy cheats to gain custody of Mr Smith, naturally both choose a succession of partners who are nowhere near their league in terms of intelligence and lifestyle. They like to fight and they like to play, but they know one another’s buttons so well that out of bitterness, scorn or hurt they occasionally push too hard; Dunne and Grant are both talented enough to let the pain of this flash across their faces momentarily, and then to cover it up in a prideful facade a moment later. And then there are gestures of unexpected compassion, pity, and once in a while a near-admission of love sustained… only they’ll never be there at the same moment until the end of the picture. Their catty circle of friends and romantic runners-up are no match for them; of course they are each their own worst enemy.
Well in my generalized ruminating I’ve begun to lose track of the few specific moments I really did intend to capture this time — only it comes to this: at all times they’re both pretty well aware of a given situation, hampered only by pride but by no means a lack of information or decision-making power. I’m thinking of, for instance, the scene where Jerry has let himself into Lucy’s apartment for a drink and Dan shows up; she pins Jerry behind a door so his unseemly presence will go unnoticed, while Dan stumbles over a preteen verse he’s written, begs for a first kiss, and giddily pronounces “I’m so happy I could eat a whole steak!” At this point, Jerry could announce himself and ruin her engagement to Dan but this corn-fed mama’s boy is hardly a threat; the poetry merits no more than a bemused eye roll. No, he’d much rather play with Lucy, tickling her with a pencil from behind the door — it’s an intimate moment, not only because he clearly knows her most sensitive spots, but because Dan Leeson’s bumbling presence hardly registers. The interplay is between Jerry and Lucy.
Well, I could go on like this for ages but the point of even starting this has by now entirely escaped me and I’ve been away from my “real work” for too long. That’ll do then for just scratching the surface — and really I’ll tighten my argument and write this thing properly eventually. Don’t be surprised if I give it another hundred viewings first, and love it just a little more each time.
As a final offering, just one of the little moments, forgetting themselves between barbs, that encapsulate what this film is all about:
Oh, no wait, one last. There are at least three moments which blatantly illustrate what I’m talking about, that Irene Dunne exhibited some of the most explicitly sexual behavior under the Code and not only got away with it, but went on to be remembered as unfailingly ladylike. Unbelievable, that; and unbelievable too that Jerry Warriner could withstand this sort of thing for a full ninety days. I submit to you:
Knowing Lucy has an appointment to meet her voice teacher and presumed lover Armand, Jerry bursts into his studio expecting to find the two in each other’s arms but instead interrupts a perfectly innocent recital, Lucy mid-song. Attempting to look cool and unconcerned, Jerry takes a seat and leans casually against the wall, loses his balance and falls — twice. It’s one of the most memorable moments in the film, as the end of a note gives way to her gentle laughter, but add to that the look on her face: pity and amusement yes, but also undisguised desire. It is, as she later admits to Aunt Patsy, the moment she realizes she still loves Jerry.
After correspondingly embarrassing herself for love, acting out the part of Jerry’s drunk and blowsy sister Lola for the benefit of his fiancee’s family, Lucy convinces Jerry to drive her to Aunt Patsy’s cabin where, she hopes, she’ll finish the seduction before their divorce becomes official at midnight. Amused as he was by her performance, now he grumbles, “Just think, if it hadn’t been for you I’d've missed all this.” With suggestively arched eyebrows and a shocking low growl, she returns, “That’s right.”
Once at the cabin, all sobriety and longing, in separate bedrooms with only a poorly latched door, a pesky cat, and their pride standing between them, the two tease, seduce, and retreat from one another until all manner of doors — metaphorical and physical — can be opened. Probably holding the distinction for being the Golden Age actress who most frequently ended her comedies in bed, before Cary gets himself permanently on her side of the threshold Irene confuses him with a wordy speech on the state of their relationship, wiggles her eyebrows at him again, dismisses him with a throaty “Goodnight,” and falls back on the mattress.
“You’re all confused, aren’t you?” Ahh… it’s the sexiest damn movie.
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.
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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