Finishing School (Wanda Tuchock, George Nicholls Jr., 1934)

Frances Dee and Bruce Cabot in Finishing School

Cast: Frances Dee, Bruce Cabot, Ginger Rogers, Billie Burker, Beulah Bondi, John Halliday, Sara Haden, Helen Freeman, Marjorie Lytell, Adalyn Doyle, Anne Shirley, Irene Franklin, Jane Darwell. Screenplay: Wanda Tuchock, Laird Doyle. Cinematography: J. Roy Hunt. Art direction: Albert S. D'Agostino, Van Nest Polglase. Film editing: Arthur P. Schmidt. 

Finishing School is a reverse Cinderella story in which poor little rich girl Virginia Radcliff (Frances Dee) finds her prince in Ralph "Mac" McFarland (Bruce Cabot), an unpaid intern at a children's hospital who supports himself by working as a waiter in a Manhattan hotel. Virginia has two wicked stepmothers: her real mother, the snobbish socialite Helen Radcliff (Billie Burke), and the headmistress of the finishing school Helen sends her off to, Miss Van Alstyne (Beulah Bondi). If there's a fairy godmother in the film, it's Virginia's wisecracking roommate, known as Pony (Ginger Rogers), who helps turn the shy and proper Virginia into something of a rebel. The movie is one of those Depression-era fables in which the tables are turned on the wealthy, and also one of the last movies to be released before the Production Code clamped down on the depiction of premarital sex. It earned a condemnation from the Catholic Legend of Decency for just that. Virginia and Mac do it in one of those pan-to-the-window scenes in which we see the snow outside filling up their footprints. And from what follows, including Virginia's refusal to see the school physician, we know the consequences even though nobody ever says "pregnant" out loud. The denouement is precipitated by a literature teacher who tells Virginia and her class that Anna Karenina's suicide was the only possible response to her breach of proper behavior, which is all that the school really teaches. It's a not-unwatchable little film that gets a nice boost occasionally from Rogers's snappy delivery of her lines, but otherwise is mainly a document of the era in which it was made.   

I Walked With a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943)

I Walked With a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943)

Cast: Frances Dee, Tom Conway, James Ellison, Edith Barrett, James Bell, Christine Gordon, Theresa Harris, Sir Lancelot, Darby Jones. Screenplay: Curt Siodmak, Ardel Wray, based on a story by Inez Wallace. Cinematography: J. Roy Hunt. Art direction: Albert S. D'Agostino, Walter E. Keller. Film editing: Mark Robson. Music: Roy Webb.

I feel a little sorry for the viewer who watches I Walked With a Zombie expecting the lurid thrills of a certain popular TV show or even the campy ones of Hammer horror films, and encounters instead a moody, dreamlike tale that borrows heavily from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. The tone of the film is set at the very beginning, when the narrator -- Frances Dee's Betsy Connell -- says in a subdued, almost matter-of-fact manner, "I walked with a zombie." The low key restraint of her narration pervades the film, which has an insidious way of working on your nerves without subjecting them to sudden shocks. I like, too, the way in which the crime of slavery works its way into the fabric of the story as a source of horror. The coachman driving Betsy to Fort Holland reminds her of "the enormous boat [that] brought the long ago fathers and the long ago mothers of us all, chained to the bottom of the boat." Betsy burbles out the white folks' familiar defense: "They brought you to a beautiful place, didn't they?" To which the coachman can only reply with a long-learned submissiveness, "If you say so, Miss. If you say so." Betsy hasn't yet learned the lesson Paul Holland (Tom Conway) tried to teach her on the ship that brought her there. As she looks out at the stars and the sea, he tells her, "Everything seems beautiful because you don't understand.... There's no beauty here, only death and decay." A shooting star streaks across the sky. "Everything good dies here," he says. "Even the stars." I Walked With a Zombie doesn't quite deliver on that premise, in part because it's too restrained and poetic in its storytelling, but it makes a good go at it.

Little Women (George Cukor, 1933)

Little Women (George Cukor, 1933)

Cast: Katharine Hepburn, Joan Bennett, Jean Parker, Frances Dee, Spring Byington, Paul Lukas, Henry Stephenson, Douglass Montgomery, Edna May Oliver, John Lodge. Screenplay: Sarah Y. Mason, Victor Heerman, based on a novel by Louisa May Alcott. Cinematography: Henry W. Gerrard. Art direction: Van Nest Polglase. Film editing: Jack Kitchin. Music: Max Steiner.

Of Human Bondage (John Cromwell, 1934)

Somerset Maugham's 1915 autobiographical novel Of Human Bondage is one of those books nobody seems to read anymore. It's not "literary" enough for academia and it's too old-fashioned for today's readers of popular fiction. But it was a big deal when RKO bought the screen rights intending it as a vehicle for Leslie Howard as the protagonist, Philip Carey. It was director John Cromwell who, having just seen Bette Davis in The Cabin in the Cotton (Michael Curtiz, 1932), thought the young Warner Bros. contract player might be right for the role of the cockney waitress Mildred in Of Human Bondage. (The Cabin in the Cotton is the one in which she plays a backwoods seductress who tells Richard Barthelmess's character, "I'd like to kiss you, but I just washed my hair.") Davis, who was unhappy with the way Warners was handling her career, also wanted to play Mildred, and finally wore down Jack Warner's resistance to lending her to RKO. It was the film that made her a star, though she continued to battle with Warners for as long as they held her contract. It is a sensational performance in a not-very-good movie. The infatuation of Philip with Mildred is only a small part of the novel, though it's probably the most interesting, and to emphasize it, screenwriter Lester Cohen had to jettison a great deal of plot and trim some of Philip's other relationships -- notably with the romance novelist Norah (Kay Johnson) and the young Sally Athelny (Frances Dee) -- to the point of incoherence. Nor did he really succeed in making Philip's attraction to Mildred entirely credible, considering that much of the movie deals with her coldness toward him. Howard does what he can, but it's really all Davis's show, and when she's not on screen you feel everything go slack. When Academy Awards time came around, everyone expected her much talked-about performance to land her a nomination for best actress, but she was overlooked. The outcry led the Academy to change its rules for the Oscars, allowing write-ins for the first time, but although Academy records show that Davis came in third, the award went to Claudette Colbert for It Happened One Night (Frank Capra). Next year, Davis would win the first of her two Oscars for Dangerous (Alfred E. Green), a movie that's if anything even weaker than Of Human Bondage, so the award is widely regarded as a kind of consolation prize for the previous year's oversight.