Category Archives: Pre-Code Reviews

City Streets
Directed by Rouben Mamoulian
Written by Oliver H.P. Garrett; adapted by Max Marsin from a story by Dashiell Hammett
1931/USA
Paramount Pictures
First viewing/YouTube

[box] The Kid: When you talk to me, take that toothpick out of your mouth.[/box]

Rouben Mamoulian brings “art” and flashy camera moves to the gangster flick.  It works out remarkably well.

Spunky Nan Cooley (Sylvia Sidney) lives with her sleazy stepfather (Guy Kibbee) who is a bodyguard to bootleggers.  She is in love with “The Kid” (Gary Cooper), who runs the shooting gallery at Coney Island and is a sharpshooter in real life.  Nan would like him to get a job with the racketeers to earn money so they can get married.  He refuses.

Loyal Nan is called on to help her stepdad by hiding the gun he has used to bump off his boss.  She is caught with the gun and refuses to cooperate with the police by naming its owner.  Though Pop promises she won’t spend a day in the pen he essentially forgets about her once she is in jail.  That is, until he runs in to The Kid and persuades him to carry a rod for the mob in order to get money to spring her.

The Kid finds he loves the high life in the beer racket.  But he’s still madly in love with Nan. When she gets out, evil Big Fellow Maskel (Paul Lukas) develops a yen for her and simply will not leave her alone.  The confrontation between the Kid and the Big Fellow takes up the remainder of the movie.

I really enjoyed this movie.  Sidney and Cooper are two of my favorite early stars and do splendidly.  Mamoulian is at his most experimental trying out every angle and gimmick he can think of.  It doesn’t hang together as well as in some of his other films but does keep up the audience’s interest throughout.  Recommended and available on YouTube.

Clip – I actually gasped when the gorgeous young Gary Cooper turned around and smiled!

The Man Who Played God
Directed by John G. Adolfi
Written by Julian Josephson and John T. Hawley from a play by Jules Eckert Goodman and a story by Governeur Morris
1932/USA
Warner Bros.
First viewing/Amazon Instant

[box] Grace Blair: You’re my ideal!

Montgomery Royle: I shall always be… your friend. [/box]

George Arliss may be an acquired taste that I may never acquire.

Montgomery Royle (Arliss) is an eccentric virtuouso concert pianist with hordes of admirers.  One of his most ardent is protegee Grace Blair (Bette Davis).  Despite their 40 year age difference, she idolizes him to the point of asking him to marry her.  He gives her six months to think it over.

Royle is concluding a successful tour in Paris with a command performance for the king of an unnamed country.  When an assassin bombs Royle’s dressing room to get at the king, Royle loses his hearing.  Deafness has been a family curse.

Grace takes off for a vacation in Santa Barbara.  While she’s gone, Royle loses his love of music and his faith in God on top of his hearing.  He becomes an expert lip reader as well as a bitter cynic and attempts suicide.  He is saved at the last minute and finds meaning in his life by reading the lips of folks on a Central Park bench through binoculars and trying to change their lives for the better.  With Ray Milland in a tiny role as one of the sad souls Arliss sees in Central Park.

I know Arliss is considered a great stage actor.  Viewed up close on screen, he appeared positively cadaverous with his heavy white make-up and silent screen poses – making the romance with Davis pretty darned creepy.  The material hasn’t aged well either.  It is pure grand melodrama of the most incredible variety.  Still it’s a quality production with a high user rating on IMDb so your mileage may vary.

This was Bette Davis’s first film under her Warner Bros. contract.  It’s one of those blonde ingenue roles she would have to fight like hell to break free of.

Emma
Directed by Clarence Brown
Written by Leonard Praskins and Zelda Sears; story by Frances Marion
1932/USA
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
First viewing/Amazon Instant

[box] Emma: You’ll get your feet wet, and forget to change your socks.[/box]

This would be just another treacly melodrama without the amazing, warm performance by Marie Dressler at its heart.

Emma (Dressler) is housekeeper to inventor Frederick Smith (Jean Herscholt) and his brood of three children.  When his wife dies in childbirth of the youngest, Emma becomes a surrogate mother to all of them.  One of Frederick’s inventions makes him rich and the oldest children grow up to be spoiled, selfish, snobs.  The eldest Isabelle (Myrna Loy) marries a count and is the worst of them.  The youngest, Ronnie (Richard Cromwell) truly loves Emma as well as flying planes.

After all the children are grown, Emma decides she can afford to take a vacation in Niagara Falls.  One thing leads to another and Frederick decides to turn the vacation into a honeymoon.  But their happiness is short-lived when he succumbs to the heart trouble that has plagued him for years.  The eldest children are appalled to find that dad left all the money to be distributed by Emma and cook up a murder case against her.

This movie pulls at the old heart strings over and over.  It never goes over the top though because Dressler keeps the central performance anchored in warm, real, humanity.  She knows how to makes us love her without feeling manipulated.  Recommended.

Marie Dressler was Oscar-nominated as Best Actress.

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I Lived with You
Directed by Maurice Elvey
Written by Ivor Novello, George A. Cooper, and H. Fowler Mear from Novello’s play
1933/UK
Gaumont British Picture Corporation/Twickenham Films/Julius Hagen Productions
First viewing/YouTube

[box] Things which do not require effort of some sort are seldom worth having. – Ivor Novello[/box]

I just loved this Ivor Novello penned British farce.

Gladys Wallis i(Ursula Jeans) s a shopgirl from a lower middle-class family.  She goes on an outing to Hampton Court with a girlfriend and gets lost in the Maze.  There she meets Felix (Novello),  a Russian prince to tells her all about his sad life since the Revolution. Gladys does not believe him until he shows her a pendant given to his mother by the Czar.  Felix is homeless and penniless.  The royalty-crazed Gladys takes him home and offers him a place to stay.

It turns out that the pendant contains several very valuable diamonds. Felix is soon adopted by the whole family.  His money and worldly ways soon turn the household upside down.  With 15-year-old Ida Lupino as Gladys’s wild sister and Jack Hawkins as her erstwhile boyfriend.

The plot summary does not do the extreme wit of the screenplay justice.  Novello is simply superb – ridiculous and charming at the same time.  My only previous acquaintance with the actor-songwriter-playwright was in Hitchcock’s The Lodger.  Now I have to seek out some of his other movies.  Highly recommended.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyExDa40qk0

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Possessed
Directed by Clarence Brown
Written by Lenore J. Coffee from a play by Edgar Selwyn
1931/USA
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
First viewing/FilmStruck

[box] Marian Martin, aka Mrs. Moreland (to her mother): If I were a man it wouldn’t frighten you! You’d think it was right for me to go out and get anything I could out of life, and use anything I had to get it. Why should men be so different? All they’ve got are their brains and they’re not afraid to use them. Well neither am I![/box]

Beautiful people and MGM Class-A production values enliven this otherwise standard woman’s picture.

Marian Martin (Joan Crawford) is a small-town middle-school dropout who works at a paper box factory.  Hard-working childhood friend Al Manning (Wallace Ford) has been after her to marry him for years.  A chance meeting with a drunk millionaire gives her the final push she needs to try her fortune in New York instead.

Almost immediately, she meets wealthy lawyer-politician Mark Whitney (Clark Gable).  He sets her up in an apartment, educates her on the ways of society, and takes her around the world.  In short, he is the best sugar daddy ever.  Marian holds herself out as a wealthy divorcee living on her ex’s alimony but fools nobody.  After a while, she chafes at her lack of marital status. But Mark is gun-shy and has high political ambitions that conflict with taking a woman with a past as his wife.  That’s when Al comes back into the picture.

I loved looking at the beautiful sets and gowns.  Joan Crawford was at the height of her beauty at this time as is the mustache-less young Gable.  I was enjoying the story, too, until the last 20 minutes when Crawford goes all noble on us.  Fans of Crawford are likely to appreciate the film even more than I did.

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Once in a Lifetime
Directed by Russell Mack
Written by Seton I. Miller from the play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart
1932/USA
Universal Pictures
First viewing/YouTube

[box] George Lewis: I don’t know anything about elocution.

May Daniels: You don’t know anything about anything, George, and if what they say about the movies is true, you’ll go far.[/box]

Hollywood did not spare itself in this funny satire about the transition from silent pictures to talkies.

Vaudeville is dying with the advent of talkies and the act of George Lewis (Jack Oakie) and May Daniels (Aline MacMahon) is dying with it.  May gets the bright idea of going to Hollywood and holding themselves out as elocution instructors.  George is as dumb as a box of rocks and he soon becomes infatuated with Susan Walker (Sidney Fox), a wannabe actress who is his intellectual soulmate.  Through sheer luck and chutzpah George takes tinsel town by storm.  The fictional studio head Herman Glogauer (Gregory Ratoff), who rejected Vitaphone, is mercilessly skewered.

The play was a big hit on Broadway.  I read about its creation in Moss Hart’s autobiography, Act One, and this was my first chance to see it.  It really is as funny as all that despite the staginess of the production.  Oakie and MacMahon are two of my favorite character actors of the period but perhaps my favorite part was Sidney Fox’s frequent recitations of the Kipling poem “Boots”.  Recommended and on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pSJO03ZzUI

Air Mail
Directed by John Ford
Written by Frank Wead from a story by Dale Van Every
1932/USA
Universal Pictures
First viewing/YouTube

[box] Duke Talbot: I’da made that flight to Paris but Lindy beat me to it.[/box]

John Ford gives us a glimpse at early aviation full of action and heart.

Stalwart pilot Mike Miller (Ralph Bellamy) runs the airmail operation at Desert Airport.  The location is beset by weather ranging from dense fog, to rain, to snow giving these “couriers” a chance to prove their mettle.  Early on, Mike loses one of his pilots in a fiery crash and gets obnoxious hot shot pilot Duke Talbot (Pat O’Brien) as a replacement.  The dead pilot just happens to be the brother of Mike’s sweetheart Ruth (Gloria Stewart).

Duke immediately starts showing off and, worse, putting the moves on willing Irene Wikins (Lilian Bond), the floozy wife of one of the other pilots.  Pilots start dropping out one by one for various reasons.  Mike’s eyes are not suited for night flying or bad weather.  Who will deliver the mail?  With Slim Summerville as a mechanic.

The main draw of this early Ford picture is some pretty stunning flying.  The director proves that he could keep everything very cinematic even early in the talkie years.  The story is filled with all the usual tropes for this kind of thing but it’s very human for all that.  Ralph Bellamy makes an attractive and likable leading man.  Recommended.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMIOOSkgJXk

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