Thirteen movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers.]

From the Criterion Channel feature Rebels at the Typewriter: Women Screenwriters of the 1930s

Working Girls (dir. Dorothy Azner, 1931). Sisters Mae and Hune (Dorothy Hall and Judith Wood) arrive in New York City, take up residence in a home for homeless young women, and seek work and romance. Paul Lukas plays a scientist in need of a secretary and a wife; Charles “Buddy” Rogers plays a lawyer in love with a socialite — at least for a while he is. Rigid class distinctions, enforced and overcome. Screenplay by Zoë Akins (friend of Willa Cather). ★★★

*

What Price Hollywood? (dir. George Cukor, 1932). The rise of Mary Evans (Constance Bennett) from waitress to movie star, “America’s Pal,” and the fall of Maximilian Carey (Lowell Sherman, who reminds me of Nathan Lane) from witty director to destitute drunk. This movie must have thrilled contemporary audiences with its scenes of work on movie sets. Some remarkable cinematography by Charles Rosher of Sunrise, particularly the desperate montage that comes late in the story. Screenplay by Jane Murfin, Ben Markson, and Allen Rivkin. ★★★★

*

Bed of Roses (dir. Gregory LaCava, 1933). Constance Bennett stars as Lorry Evans, a prostitute on parole who poses as a journalist in order to seduce a wealthy bachelor (Stephen Paige) and get herself set up in her own apartment, sleeping in, yes, a bed adorned with roses. But Lorry’s heart belongs to a lower-level capitalist, a cotton-barge owner (Joel McCrea), to whom she is afraid to reveal her past. A remarkably frank pre-Code story about sexual autonomy and class, with Pert Kelton (the first Alice Kramden) as Lorry’s sidekick and Franklin Pangborn as a floorwalker. Screenplay by Wanda Tuchock, Gregory LaCava, and Eugene Thackrey. ★★★★

*

Finishing School (dir. George Nicholls Jr. and Wanda Tuchock, 1934). Frances Dee is Virginia Radcliff, of the New York Radcliffs don’t you know, dumped by her mother (Billie Burke) at Crockett Hall Finishing School in New Jersey, where free-spirited roommate Pony (Ginger Rogers) revels in booze, cigarettes, and city weekends with louche Ivy League men. On one of those weekends, meek Virginia meets and falls for Ralph McFarland (Bruce Cabot), an interning doctor and all-around good guy who’s supporting himself as a hotel waiter. The relationship (which includes a night together in a boathouse) meets with the disapproval of mother Radcliff and the witch who runs Crockett (Beulah Bondi), but Virginia rebels, and Ralph tells off the classist authorities with the movie’s best line: “Maybe you don’t realize that the world’s too busy earning its three squares a day to worry about what fork to eat ’em with.” Screenplay by Laird Doyle and Wanda Tuchock. ★★★★

*

Rockabye (dir. George Cukor, 1932). Stage star Judy Carroll (Constance Bennett) is beset by trouble: with a former lover, an adopted toddler, an alcoholic mother, an agent who’s in love with her (Paul Lukas), and a married man she loves (Joel McCrea). A few moments of pre-Code eros, many moments of comedy (mostly via Jobyna Howland as Judy’s mother Snooks) and many moments of great pathos and stoic strength. This movie tears one’s heart out and then plays keepaway with it — just when it seems within reach, it’s gone again. Screenplay by Jane Murfin, from a play by Lucia Bronder. ★★★★

*

Midnight Mary (dir. William A. Wellman, 1933). Loretta Young as Mary Martin, a woman who from her orphan childhood has had nothing but bad breaks, with her life told in one long flashback as she awaits the jury’s verdict in her trial for murder. Ricardo Cortez and Franchot Tone appear as polar-opposite love interests in a pre-Code story full of mayhem and sex. Best scene: the dead body against the rattling door. Screenplay by Anita Loos, Gene Markey, and Kathryn Scola. ★★★★

*

You and Me (dir. Fritz Lang, 1938). A charmingly loopy effort, with Harry Carey is a department-store owner and altruist who employs ex-convicts, among them, one Joe (George Raft), who falls for shopgirl Helen (Sylvia Sidney). All’s well until the old gang wants to bring Joe in on a plan to rob the store. With familiar faces old and new: Roscoe Karns, Barton MacLane, George E. Stone, and a young Bob Cummings, who might have been good for a mystery-actor post, save that he already looks like Bob Cummings. Screenplay by Virginia Van Upp, Norman Krasna, and Jack Moffitt. ★★★★

*

Blondie of the Follies (dir. Edmund Goulding, 1932). Marion Davies stars as Blondie McClune, who rises from a three-generation-crowded Brooklyn apartment to a Broadway career and swank Manhattan digs. There’s one problem: Blondie and her best pal Lottie Callahan (Billie Dove) are both after the same fellow, Larry Belmont (Robert Montgomery), and as with Betty and Veronica, the rivalry goes on and on and on, and on. Weirdest moment, Davies and Jimmy Durante spoofing Grand Hotel (which Goulding directed). Screenplay by Frances Marion, Anita Loos, and Ralph Spence. ★★

*

Hold Your Man (dir. Sam Wood, 1933). Ruby (Jean Harlow) and Eddie (Clark Gable) meet when he ducks into her apartment and bathtub to avoid the cops. Ruby and Eddie are instantly attracted to one another, though many complications will follow, and Ruby will be sent off to a reformatory before the story comes to its end. Wildly funny, with poignant moments, slaps and punches, and plenty of snappy dialogue: “I got two rules I always stick to when I’m out visitin’: keep away from couches, and stay on your feet.” Screenplay by Anita Loos and Howard Emmett Rogers. ★★★★

*

Sadie McKee (dir. Clarence Brown, 1934). “Every gal has her price, and mine’s high”: so says Sadie McKee (Joan Crawford), daughter of a maid to wealthy business owners, one of whom, lawyer Michael (Franchot Tone) has been Sadie’s pal from childhood. When Michael fires Sadie’s boyfriend Tommy (Gene Raymond), the young couple flee to New York City, where many challenges await. Wealth comes back into the picture when Sadie meets the kind, shambling alcoholic Brennan (Edward Arnold, in a brilliant performance), but the lasting images in this movie are of deprivation and want: a miserable furnished room for rent, an abandoned piece of Automat pie rendered inedible with a cigarette butt. Screenplay by John Meehan, Viña Delmar, and Carey Wilson. ★★★★

*

Hallelujah (dir. King Vidor, 1929). An all-Black cast in a story of transgression and redemption: Zeke (Daniel L. Haynes, in a role meant for Paul Robeson), the oldest son in a family of sharecroppers, falls in with bad company in the form of Chick (Nina Mae McKinney), shoots his own brother in a barroom fracas, and finds redemption as the preacher Brother Ezekiel — though only for a while. As a story, it’s hackneyed, full of stereotypes and improbability (two stars), but as a record of folk forms on film and with sound, it’s invaluable (four stars): we see dancing, dicing, praying, preaching, mourning, and baptisms. The best scene: the train to hell. Screenplay by Wanda Tuchock, Richard Schayer, and Ransom Rideout. ★★/★★★★

*

Tugboat Annie (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1932). Marie Dressler and Wallace Beery are Annie and Terry, operators of the tugboat Narcissus; she, a dedicated captain; he, a hapless alcoholic. Their son Alec (Robert Young) grows up to be a dashing young captain, engaged to the pretty cipher Pat (Maureen O’Sullivan). The comedy here is very thin — seeing someone drink hair tonic and stumble just isn’t funny — but the movie is partly redeemed by an exciting ending, when a storm rages and Terry risks his life to make repairs to the Narcissus. Screenplay by Norman Reilly Raine, Zelda Sears, and Eve Greene. ★★

*

Dinner at Eight (dir. George Cukor, 1933). It’s a big picture, à la Grand Hotel: “MORE STARS THAN HAVE EVER BEEN IN ANY PICTURE BEFORE,” screamed an advertisement, with John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Wallace Beery, Billie Burke, Marie Dressier, Jean Harlow, and many others on hand. But I found it dreadfully dull: a strained, stagey examination of the problems of the rich and the formerly rich, with some bright moments from John Barrymore, Dressler, and Harlow. Sometimes I felt that I was watching a 111-minute-long New Yorker cartoon: “I particularly wanted the aspic — it’s so dressy!” Screenplay by Frances Marion, Herman J. Mankiewicz, and George S. Kaufman. ★★

*

The other movies in this feature: ‌Back Street (dir. John M. Stahl, 1932), Make Way for Tomorrow (dir. Leo McCarey, 1937), and Red-Headed Woman (dir. Jack Conway, 1932). I’ve seen and can recommend them all. Make Way for Tomorrow is the movie that Orson Welles said “would make a stone cry.”

Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)