Monthly Archives: June 2018

Back Street
Directed by John M. Stahl
Written by Gladys Lehman and Lynn Starling from a novel by Frannie Hurst
1932/USA
Universal Pictures
First viewing/YouTube

[box] Ray Schmidt: I know myself so well – it’s all the way or zero with me.[/box]

Irene Dunne gives heart to this top-drawer melodrama.

Fun-loving Ray Schmidt (Dunne) is playing the field around the turn of the last century when she falls hard for rich, handsome Walter Saxel.  It just so happens that he is engaged.  On the day he is supposed to introduce Ray to Mama as a potential future bride she is called away by a family emergency.  They meet again in New York five years later.  Ray does not wait for a wedding ring from the now married Walter and he begins to “keep” her in an apartment.

Walter refuses to let Ray work or have a child so she spends a lot of lonely time waiting around while he is with his family or on extended business trips.  Eventually, his children discover the affair but are unable to break it off.  Twenty-five yers of mutual devotion end as they inevitably must, even in the pre-Code days.

John Boles overdoes it but Dunne is solid as a rock in this.  I believed every one of her tears without feeling manipulated in the least.  Recommended.

Back Street was remade in 1941 with Margaret Sullavan and Charles Boyer and in 1961 with Susan Hayward and John Gavin, neither of which I have seen.

Montage of clips

Holiday
Directed by Edward H. Griffith
Written by Horace Jackson from a play by Philip Barry
1930/USA
Pathé Exchange
First viewing/YouTube

[box] Linda Seton: Do you realize life walked into this house today?[/box]

I liked this original version of Holiday almost as much as its more famous 1938 .

Johnny Case (Robert Ames) and Julia Seton (Mary Astor) meet and fall in love while on vacation.  He proposes and she accepts.  Then she takes him home to meet her family in the big city.  She had kept quiet about the family’s immense wealth.  Johnny is of working class origins but has made good as a corporate lawyer.

Father rules the roost in the Seton family and is the soul of propriety.  He gives Johnny the once over and when he learns of the lucrative deals he has put together decides he is worthy.  Father’s domineering ways, however, have left sister Linda (Ann Harding) lonely and frustrated and son Ned a burgeoning alcoholic.

Johnny has kept a secret, too.  He is determined to take a long holiday from working once he has saved twenty thousand dollars.  He wants to find out who he is and what he really wants while he is still young enough to do something about it.  Things come to head on the night of the engagement party.  The sides square off with Linda and her free-thinking friends in the playroom, Julia and Dad in the ballroom and Johnny somewhere between the two …  With Edward Everett Horton as one on Linda’s friends.  He went on to reprise the same part in the 1938 version.

I wasn’t following along but I imagine most of the dialogue is word-for-word the same between the two versions of the story.  Robert Ames is a non-entity in the role very colorfully played by Cary Grant.  In contrast, Ann Harding is more than adequate in the Katharine Hepburn part.  She is less zany but perhaps more convincing in her thoughtful way.  Mary Astor is sublime, as usual.  Recommended.

Holiday was nominated for Academy Awards in the categories of Best Actress (Harding) and Best Writing (Adaptation).