The Cheat (George Abbott, 1931)

Tallulah Bankhead in The Cheat

Cast: Tallulah Bankhead, Harvey Stephens, Irving Pichel, Jay Fassett, Ann Andrews, William Ingersoll, Hanaki Yoshiwara, Willard Dashiell, Edward Keane, Robert Strange. Screenplay: Harry Hervey, based on a silent film scenario by Hector Turnbull. Cinematography: George J. Folsey. Film editing: Emma Hill. 

Tallulah Bankhead is the only reason to see the cornball and somewhat racist The Cheat today. Bankhead made only a handful of films, and only one or two of them -- chiefly Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944) -- are any good. The Cheat was an old Paramount property, originally directed by Cecil B. DeMille in 1915, that was dragged out of mothballs to be remade for Bankhead. She plays Elsa Carlyle, happily married to the broker Jeffrey Carlyle (Harvey Stephens), but given to spending and gambling beyond their means. Faced with a debt she can't pay, she turns to a wealthy socialite just returned from spending time in "the Orient," Hardy Livingstone (Irving Pichel). Livingstone has picked up all sorts of sinister Asian artifacts and manners, and keeps dolls representing his sexual conquests in a cabinet. He brands the dolls with his own insignia. It soon becomes clear that he plans to add an effigy of Elsa to his collection, and when she spurns his advances he brands her, too, with a hot iron applied just above her breast. (Some production stills and posters show Bankhead baring a shoulder instead of her chest.) She shoots Livingstone, but only wounds him, and when Carlyle arrives, followed by the police, he claims to have fired the pistol. A trial ensues. Even contemporary reviewers found the movie old-fashioned and noted that the audiences laughed in all the wrong places. There's some impressive camerawork directed by George J. Folsey, but also a rather kitschy Thai-Balinese dance number choreographed by Ruth St. Denis. Bankhead does what she can with the material, which isn't enough, and she and director George Abbott returned to Broadway, where they had more success. 

Too Many Girls (George Abbott, 1940)

Hal Le Roy, Lucille Ball, Richard Carlson, Eddie Bracken, Desi Arnaz in Too Many Girls

Cast: Lucille Ball, Richard Carlson, Ann Miller, Eddie Bracken, Frances Langford, Desi Arnaz, Hal Le Roy, Libby Bennett, Harry Shannon, Douglas Walton, Chester Clute, Tiny Person, Ivy Scott, Byron Shores, Van Johnson. Screenplay: John Twist, based on a play by George Marion Jr. Cinematography: Frank Redman. Art direction: Van Nest Polglase, Carroll Clark. Film editing: William Hamilton. Songs: Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart.

When Desi met Lucy -- that's the most memorable thing about this silly college musical that was directed on stage by George Abbott, who brought over several members of the original cast when he was hired to make the film version at RKO. It was designed to be a vehicle for Lucille Ball, an RKO contract player who hadn't been in the stage production and whose singing voice wasn't up to the demands of the Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart songs of the original show, so she was dubbed by Trudy Erwin. Among the cast hired out of the original were Eddie Bracken, Hal Le Roy, and Desi Arnaz, as well as a young chorus boy, Van Johnson, who has a couple of lines but goes uncredited. Although Arnaz is paired in most of the film with Ann Miller, he and Ball hit it off when they weren't on screen and married shortly after the movie wrapped. The story is nonsense about Connie Casey (Ball), a playgirl whose father wants her to settle down and go to college at his alma mater, Pottawatomie, in New Mexico. But he also hires some bodyguards, four young college football players, to keep her out of trouble. And so it goes, as the four bodyguards lead the Pottawatomie football team to a string of victories, and one of them, Clint Kelly (Richard Carlson), falls hard for Connie. It's very loose-jointed stuff, with some lively musical numbers spotlighting Arnaz, Miller, Frances Langford, and a large company of dancers directed by LeRoy Prinz, but a lot of dull filler in between. It's amusing to see Eddie Bracken before he got stereotyped as a doofus in Preston Sturges movies, and a crewcut Richard Carlson before he wound up as the very square star of such 1950s sci-fi movies as It Came From Outer Space (Jack Arnold, 1953) and Creature From the Black Lagoon (Arnold, 1954).