Category Archives: Pre-Code Reviews

Cimarron
Directed by Wesley Ruggles
Written by Howard Eastabrook from a novel by Edna Ferber
1931/US
RKO Radio Pictures
IMDb page
Repeat viewing/Amazon Prime rental

Yancy Cravat: Why, we’ve had enough of this Wichita. We’re goin’ out to a brand new two-fisted, rip snortin’ country full of Indians, rattlesnakes, gun toters and desperados. Whoopee!

Sure did win a lot of Oscars for such a terrible movie.

Heroic editor and lawyer Yancy Cravat(Richard Dix) repeatedly abandons his steadfast wife Sabra (Irene Dunne) and family and helps to make Oklahoma great????!!!! In the end it is Sabra who holds down the family’s newspaper business and civilizes the new territory. This is basically an epic starting with the Oklahoma Land Rush and ending with the oil boom. The most impressive scenes are the land rush sequences. Otherwise, even usually reliable actors murder the overwrought dialogue.

Possibly I should cut this film some slack but I really do not feel like it. I hate movies like this one, especially when they are over two hours long and when they feature “comic” stutterers and dubious racial stereotyping etc. Instead I will nominate it for several awards: Worst Picture to Win an Oscar, Worst Performance by an Actor Nominated for an Oscar (Richard Dix), and Worst Performance by Irene Dunne in a Motion Picture.

Non-PC clip

Arrowsmith
Directed by John Ford
Written by Sidney Howard from the novel by Sinclair Lewis
1931/US
The Samuel Goldwyn Company
IMDb page
Repeat viewing/Amazon Prime rental

Dr. Martin Arrowsmith: God give me clear eyes and freedom from haste. God give me anger against all pretense. God keep me looking for my own mistakes. God keep me at it till my results are proven. God give me strength not to trust to God.

Solid story about one physican’s struggle with disease both in his patients and in the laboratory?  It’s  an adaptation of the Sinclair Lewis novel.

M.D. Martin Arrowsmith (Ronald Colman) dreams of being a research scientist but abandons this in favor of becoming a country GP when he marries and needs to support his first love Leora  (Helen Hayes). Later, he rejoins his research mentor and works on a cure for bubonic plague. He and Lee take off for the West Indies where Arrowsmith’s mentor insists that he conduct an experiment giving half the life-saving drug to one half of the population and the other half nothing. Events set up a battle between the doctor’s head and heart.  With Myrna Loy as a society lady who wants to help Arrowsmith innoculate the masses.

The film suffers from a “white man’s burden” attitude toward race as well as from Richard Bennett’s horrendous Swedish accent. It was interesting to see uncredited early performances by Ford regulars Ward Bond and John Qualen. I can recommend if you are interested in a serious romance/drama. Colman and Hayes are excellent.

The film was nominated for Academy Awards in the categories of Best Picture; Best Writing, Adaptation; Best Cinematography and Best Art Direction.

NIght Flight
Directed by Clarence Brown
Written by Oliver H. G. Garrett from a novel by Antoine de Saint-Expury
1933/US
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
IMDb page
Repeat viewing/Amazon Prime rental

This all-star MGM extravaganza could have used a little more oomph and character development.

The story is based on an Antoine de Saint-Exupéry novel recounting experiences he had as a pilot in South America. A french airmail company is headquartered in Buenos Aires.  Its manager (John Barrymore) is an SOB that is determined that the introduction of night mail will succeed in spite of all obstacles.  The weather is his main enemy.  We are drawn into the story by a small polio patient in Rio de Janeiro who must receive life-saving serum from Santiago within 24 hours or die.  All the characters are ignorant of this of course.  They are just carrying the mail.  Clark Gable, Robert Montgomery and William Gargan play the brave pilots.  Helen Hayes and Myrna Loy are the pilots’ terrified wives.  Lionel Barrymore plays a downtrodden flight inspector who suffers mightly from eczema and scratches throughout.This is the story of the inauguration of the first night air mail service and the dangers those early pilots faced. Night flight in an era without radar must have seemed to people in the 30’s like space travel did to folks in the 50’s and 60’s. I was able to watch this in HD this time around and it helped the film enormously. Gable has hardly a line in the movie though he does have a key part.

This was the last picture the Barrymore Brothers appeared in together.

Dancing Lady
Directed by Robert Z. Leonard
Written by Allen Rivkin and P.J. Wolfson from a book by James Warner Bellah
1933/US
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
IMDb page
Repeat viewing/Amazon Prime rental

Janie ‘Duchess’ Barlow: I’m like the guy throwing quarters in the slot machine. I keep on trying.

Joan Crawford plays the title character and gets to show off her dance moves in this all-star MGM musical extravaganza.

Janie Barlow (Crawford) lives to dance but is currently stuck in a burlesque show. Tod Newton (Franchot Tone) and some of his high class friends attend the show as a bit of slumming. Tod immediately has the hots for Janie and bails her out when she is arrested in a raid of the burlesque house. Since she can’t be bought for money or fancy presents, he tries to get next to her by helping to fulfill her dreams of dancing on Broadway.

He finally softens her up slightly through his friend, a producer of a show directed by Patch Gallagher (Clark Gable). Patch is not about to have an untalented newcomer foisted upon him so sets up a “brush off” audition with the stage manager and his underlings (Ted Healy and the Three Stooges). But it turns out Janie is a fantastic dancer. We watch as she makes good, all the time dodging Franchot’s advances.

The stars shine but, unfortunately, I didn’t think the musical numbers were up to much. This clearly was made before the heyday of the MGM musical. With Fred Astaire (in his screen debut) playing himself; Nelson Eddy singing in one of his first roles; Robert Benchley; and the Three Stooges as stagehands. These folks deserved something more than Bavarian beer garden numbers.

What a Busby Berkeley style number looks like when you don’t have Busby Berkeley at the helm.

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I also recently rewatched “The Little Giant” (1933) which I previously reviewed here.

White Zombie
Directed by Victor Halperin
Written by Garnett Weston from a novel by William B. Seabrook
1932/US
Victor & Edward Halperin Productions
IMDb page
Repeat viewing/Amazon Prime rental

Charles Beaumont: Zombies!
Legendre: Yes, they are my servants. Did you think we could do it alone?

This is an effective low budget independent film noted for being the first zombie movie, though these zombies do not feed on human flesh but are more or less slaves.

On an ocean voyage plantation owner Charles Beaumont (Robert Frazer) falls for a woman (Madge Bellamy) who is sailing to Haiti to be married. Once they return to the island and she meets her intended, Beaumont enlists the help of evil sugar mill owner Legendre (Bela Lugosi) to make her his own. Legendre does this by using a hypnotic drug and making her a zombie like all the workers at his mill. Is there any going back? And what sinister plans does Bela have for her?

This is pretty darn creepy without a drop of blood to be seen.  Lugosi’s performance is very like that in Dracula (1931), with the hypnotic stare and slow emphatic delivery. The zombies look pretty much like the zombies in more modern fare.  The print I watched on Amazon is the best I have seen and gave me more appreciation for the film.

Bird of Paradise
Directed by King Vidor
Written by Wells Root, Wanda Tuchock and Leonard Praskins from a play by Richard Walton Tulley
1932/US
RKO Radio Pictures
IMDb page
First viewing/Amazon Prime rental

Johnny Baker: Aw, you haven’t sinned. I loved you and you loved me. That’s all there is to it.
Luana: But, I taboo for white man, Johnny.

They say the play was more ridiculous than the movie but I suspect it was a close call.

Johnny Baker (Joel McCrea) is on a yacht trip in the South Seas when he is dragged from the boat by a shark. Native beauty Luana (Delores Del Rio) cuts the rope that has entangled McCrea with the fish. The two are instantly smitten. The yacht crew is invited to Del Rio’s island for a welcome banquet. When McCrea attempts to carry her off for some nookie he learns that she is taboo, is to marry the prince of the island, and is also set to be a sacrifice to the god Pele if the island’s volcano erupts. The yacht crew leaves McCrea behind. Before long the two are lovers and flee to another island. Can they escape the long arm of Dolores’s father?

For me this veers into the so bad it’s good category. I never thought I’d say that about a film directed by Vidor. But seriously some of the dialogue is such high camp that I laughed out loud. The main attraction for me is that McCrea spends much of the movie without his shirt on.  It didn’t help that the version I watched on Amazon Prime was colorized. There are several versions currently available on YouTube for free.

Taxi
Directed by Roy Del Ruth
Written by Kubic Glasmon and John Bright from a play by Kenyon Nicholson
1931/US
Warner Bros.
IMDb Page
Repeat viewing/Amazon Prime rental

Matt Nolan: Come out and take it, you dirty, yellow-bellied rat, or I’ll give it to you through the door!

Warner cashes in on Cagney’s success in “The Public Enemy” with another tough-guy role, this time as an embattled taxi driver.

A New York City crime syndicate wants to take over the taxi business currently conducted by independent cabbies.  Matt Nolan (Cagney) is one of these.  Pop Riley (Guy Kibee)is another.  Pop defends himself against  the syndicate with force and winds up in jail where he dies.  His daughter Sue (Loretta Young) tells a group of independent taxi drivers that violence is not the answer.  Matt strongly disagrees but Sue soon becomes his steady girl.

Despite his hot temper, Sue loves Matt and they marry.  At their marriage dinner, Matt spots the syndicate boss responsible for the attacks on independents.  He prepares to fight him despite Sue’s pleading.  In the uproar, the syndicate boss stabs and kills Matt’s brother.  Matt won’t tell the cops who did it because he wants to take revenge.  The rest of the movie is devoted to Matt’s revenge plans and Sue’s efforts to stop him from landing in jail like her father.

Cagney seems to spend more time playfully pushing around Loretta Young than he does fighting the bad guys. The most fun to be had in this movie is seeing Cagney speak Yiddish and do his first movie dancing in a fox trot contest with an uncredited George Raft. I liked this much better the second time I saw it.

Morning Glory
Directed by Lowell Sherman
Written by Howard J. Green from the play by Zoe Atkins
1933/US
RKO Radio Pictures
IMDb page
Repeat viewing/Amazon Prime rental

Eva Lovelace: I hope you’re going to tell me your name. I want you for my first friend in New York. Mine’s Eva Lovelace. It’s partly made up and partly real. It was Ada Love. Love’s my family name. I added the ‘lace.’ Do you like it, or would you prefer something shorter? A shorter name would be more convenient on a sign. Still, ‘Eva Lovelace in Camille,’ for instance, or ‘Eva Lovelace in Romeo and Juliet’ sounds very distinguished, doesn’t it?

Katharine Hepburn knocks it out of the park and wins her first Oscar for only her third film.

Young Eva Lovelace (Hepburn) comes to New York City straight off the little theater stage of her native Vermont and expects to take Broadway by storm. She is naive, a bit gouche, and obsessed with the theater. Though she is loaded with talent, she finds out that it is not that easy to break into it.

She walks straight into the office of Louis Easton, one of the biggest Broadway producers. Easton has his play already cast in his head and only reluctantly gives her a few minutes of his time at the urging of playwright Joseph Sheridan (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.).  She meets old trooper Robert Harley Hedges (C. Aubrey Smith) who is amused by her non-stop stage-struck prattle and agrees to give her acting lessons.  Eva’s career goes downhill rapidly from here and finally sputters to a complete halt.  She is now starving.

She runs into Harley Hedges in a coffee shop where she has ordered only coffee and he takes pity on her and brings her to a cast party hosted by Easton.  She proceeds to get really drunk on only two glasses of champagne.  She goes from stumbling all over herself to delivering marvelous impromptu renditions of the Hamlet monologue and a speech from Romeo and Juliet to the astonished guests.  Eventually she passes out and Easton takes advantage of her.  She is now madly in love with him but he views the incident as a gigantic mistake.  I will go no further.

For some reason, I didn’t expect to like this one as much as I did when I first saw it and it only improved on my second viewing. I thought the film was great and that Hepburn was fantastic. She captured the foolish over-confidence and fears of the young so perfectly. Recommended.

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I also rewatched “Back Street” (1932) and was once again captivated by Irene Dunne.  I reviewed that movie here.

Sweepings
Directed by John Cromwell
Written by Lester Cohen from his novel
1933/US
RKO Radio Pictures
IMDb page

Daniel Pardway: I rattle around in that old house like a pea in a shoe box.

Lionel Barrymore arrives in town looking for opportunities just after the Great Chicago fire. He has little money but big dreams. He decides to open a kind of general store sell all the items people will need to rebuild. Over the decades the store prospers along with Lionel. By this time Lionel has four grown children: Eric Linden, William Gargan, Gloria Stuart and Alan Dinehart. He longs to leave his business to them but they are spoiled and lack either the interest or the aptitude or both.

This movie did not wow me. Barrymore is always excellent.

Riptide
Directed by Edmund Goulding
Written by Edmund Goulding and several uncredited writers
1934/US
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
IMDb page
First viewing/Amazon Prime rental

Mary: No man’s gonna let me or not let me do anything ever again.

Mary (Norma Shearer) plays a freethinking woman with a “wild past”. She meets aristocrat Lord Rexford (Herbert Marshall, falls in love, and marries him. She tells him about her wicked ways and he swears he can forgive and forget. Three years later, they have a happy marriage and live in style with their adorable little daughter. He must travel to New York without her.

Mary takes the opportunity stay with her aunt Hettie (Mrs. Patrick Campbell) in her Riviera home. There she meets Tommy (Robert Montgomery), with whom she shares a past. He now drunkenly attempts to woo her but Norma stands strong. A paparazzi gets a photo of an innocent kiss and Herbert refuses to believe it was innocent and files for divorce. The couple separates and Tommy arrives in New York to continue his seduction campaign. Can a happy ending be pulled out of this situation? Do you have to ask?

Shearer seems to have made the same movie over and over. She reforms her wild ways through love. But her husband doesn’t understand her. There’s always Robert Montgomery around to get dumped. This is not the best of the films with this plot but it is quite watchable. As always, Shearer looks fabulous in her gowns by Adrian.