|
The Crash1932 US Dir William Dieterle Cast Ruth Chatterton, George Brent, Lois Wilson, Barbara Leonard, Paul Cavanagh, Henry Kolker IMDb |
Terse & intense as all good WB pre-Codes, and chilling in its depiction of a pathological fear of poverty. Linda & Geoff Gault grew up in poor families, but made their fortune in the twenties with an “unspoken conspiracy”: he whores her out for stock tips, which he converts into all the trappings of the high life. Geoff has so completely conflated love and money and is generally too drunk to discriminate further, while Linda finds her dependence on money has quite thoroughly drained from her any love she once felt — resulting conversations and actions are uniformly stunners. In a moment of feminine pride, Linda tells a lie that brings the worst of the stock market crash on them with a rather ingenious trickle-down effect to just about everyone they know. Certainly cast in the mold of Eve, this one. She turns her charms on a few more hapless men before she, and a sobered Geoff, learn to put love and money in proper perspective. In the meantime, it makes a fairly rich psychological study, and certainly a compelling watch, here frothy entertainment, there spiraling horror show.
But as to my other source of enjoyment: though neither the age nor the type for it, Ruth doesn’t leave a shred of doubt that she’s capable of seducing men out of inside information and whole fortunes. That’s total confidence and command, y’all, with that stage-perfect elocution and bored dismissiveness constantly belied by and giving way to girlish giggles and devilish grins. I can only confess she could probably persuade me to do anything she might want. And George Brent, ugh, he’s turning into an interesting special case. The man is so, so boring, and always does look bored (though does the giggle thing, too, from time to time, and I must admit it’s disarming) — NO, he’s boring and awfully pretty with eyebrows Joan Crawford would envy and has the primmest sitting posture and yet! And yet, the reflection of him in the eyes of a fascinating woman is enough to make me fall quite soundly in love with him. Simply through contract negotiation and having affairs with the right women George Brent is earning a place in my affections… it feels like such a cheat, a free pass. But it’s working for me.
No Comments »
No comments yet. RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URILeave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed:<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
