Waterloo Bridge Posted 30 June 2008 in Screening log with 3 comments 1931 US Dir James Whale Cast Mae Clarke, Douglass Montgomery, Bette Davis, Doris Lloyd, Frederick Kerr, Enid Bennett, Ethel Griffies IMDb

Waterloo Bridge makes a great counterpoint to Red-Headed Woman, available together on one of the fantastic TCM Forbidden Hollywood discs. They’re two very different films that begin to illustrate the range of issues and styles at play in pre-Code cinema. But it’s a particularly good follow-up for me, when I was beginning to wonder if I have been effectively capturing why I love this era in film. I’m afraid my entries read as litanies of dirty deeds and naughty inferences — and generally, these aspects are too delicious to resist the urge to simply catalogue. All that’s here in the usual measure: backstage undressing, sheer brassieres, undisguised prostitution. But the pre-Codes had more going for them that post-Codes lost sight of than simple shock value and an alternately adult and sophomoric sense of freedom. Pre-Codes also have the unique ability to present ideas and lives in realistic, humane and honest ways. Where Red-Headed Woman scandalizes and entertains, Waterloo Bridge affects the viewer on unnerving emotional levels. Both are equally valid, and represent just a couple facets of the deep and fascinating landscape of this period.

Mae Clarke plays Myra with mesmerizing intensity, her histrionics and hand-wringing always grounded in the truth of a moment. Her work is nuanced and expressive; the viewer can sense the changes in mood and outlook that flash across her face as the balance of power and information shift continually over the course of her scenes. Myra is an out-of-work chorus girl in wartime London who has been forced to walk the streets to pay her rent. Waterloo Bridge is the famed spot to pick up soldiers on leave, and it’s where she finds Douglass Montgomery’s Roy, an innocent and fair-minded young man, growing up quickly after all he’s seen. The film’s satellite characters cover the full spectrum of society and sympathy, each wielding some degree of control over the couple’s fate. When lovestruck Roy proposes, everyone — from her pal Kitty’s practical appeal to self-preservation (”Who says it’s stealing? Marriage is legal, ain’t it?”) to her would-be mother-in-law’s equally frank and level reasoning that it can never happen — prevails upon Myra to do the right thing, until the weight of her secret nearly drives her insane.

Myra’s situation is one that could never have been dealt with sympathetically under the full enforcement of the Hays Code. Here, Myra is presented as a woman with no means of survival but prostitution, who accepts this as true even as she deeply loathes herself for it. Her conflict is absolutely genuine. And her struggle is with a society that implicitly accepts it, but can never accept her: in rejecting her, Roy’s mother is kind, but matter-of-fact. A woman with her past cannot marry into his family. It’s simple, it’s true, it’s heartbreaking. Contrast this with attempts to cover the same ground a few years later: prostitution was addressed in cryptic terms (”clip joint,” “party girl”) and women were either carefully reformed or soundly punished for their undoubtedly vile and sinful occupation. Myra Deauville, Lily Powers, Jerry Martin and the rest were by contrast real women, whose horrific predicaments could shock more deeply than an unexpected glimpse of a nipple. These same women would soon all but disappear from movie screens for decades: although powerful and delightful roles would continue to serve leading women in Hollywood, only in brief and subversive glimpses would they continue to resemble real women.

Red-Headed Woman Posted 29 June 2008 in Screening log with 4 comments 1932 US Dir John Francis Dillon Cast Jean Harlow, Chester Morris, Lewis Stone, Una Merkel, Charles Boyer, Leila Hyams, Henry Stephenson IMDb

MGM originally intended this story of ruthless social climber Lil Andrews for Greta Garbo, who, despite playing her share of women on the fringes of respectability, is difficult to imagine in such a completely salacious role — at least the Garbo of the talkies. Jean Harlow, if half as gifted, is perfectly cast here, in a film that showcases the talents she did possess to full effect. Her playfulness gives the lurid tale the right comic counterpoint, and her unique brand of suggestiveness ensures no shade of meaning will go undetected.

Even so, Red-Headed Woman is unusual in presenting a wholly unsympathetic and irredeemable main character. Pre-Code cinema is full of wicked women who heartlessly sleep their way to the top, but generally their actions are tempered by a terrible past that drove them to it or an underlying goodness revealed in other areas of their lives. Lil seems to have suffered no more seriously than the average working girl, and no amount of care for her friends or innocent parties intermingles with her drive to snag a rich man, and once secured, a richer man. She stomps and spits her way through the film, throws tantrums, whines and coos in baby-talk — oh, it’s a hoot to watch Jean do it, but not for a moment is Lil less than vile. In Baby Face, which is probably the darker and more disturbing film, one always does root for and understand Lilly. Red-Headed Woman is all the more shocking precisely because Lil continually appalls you.

The film earns its pre-Code credentials and then some, rife not just with sex but thoroughgoing sadism (Jean’s delightful “Do it again, I like it!”), and it in no way ultimately reaffirms a moral standard or punishes Lil for her transgressions. Although seventeen cuts and edits were made to satisfy the Hays office, the film is hardly restrained or subtle, with even the most innocuous lines taking on deliciously dirty significance with the right delivery, as in second conquest Chaaaar-lie’s flustered remark that “Personally, I should like to meet her half-way.”