Ladies' Man (Lothar Mendes, 1931)

Kay Francis and William Powell in Ladies' Man

Cast: William Powell, Kay Francis, Carole Lombard, Olive Tell, Gilbert Emery, Martin Burton, John Holland, Frank Atkinson, Maude Turner Gordon. Screenplay: Herman J. Mankiewicz, based on a novel by Rupert Hughes. Cinematography: Victor Milner. Costume design: Travis Banton. Music: Karl Hajos, Herman Hand, John Leipold.

With his receding hairline, big nose, and dubious chin, William Powell has always seemed to me an unlikely leading man, but he made quite a go of it teaming with actresses like Myrna Loy, Kay Francis, and Carole Lombard. But even Powell felt he was miscast as Jamie Darricott, the handsome gigolo of Ladies' Man who dines and wines the society matron Mrs. Fendley (Olive Tell), taking her, fashionably late, to the opera -- she muses that she's always wondered if Tosca really has a first act. He's performing a necessary service: Her banker husband, Horace (Gilbert Emery), is more devoted to making money than to being married, so even he tolerates Darricott's services -- at least for a while. Trouble starts when Rachel Fendley (Lombard), their daughter, takes a fancy to Darricott. Up to that point, Ladies' Man has been a passable sophisticated comedy of manners, but then Darricott meets Norma Page (Francis) and they fall in love. For a while the film turns into a romantic comedy tinged with farce, as Rachel tries to get Darricott away from Norma. And then it gets serious: Horace Fendley decides that he can't tolerate Darricott's involvement with both his wife and his daughter, and he threatens Darricott's life. This muddle of tones and genres is only made messier by miscasting, which extends beyond Powell's unsuitability for the role. Lombard tries at first to be suave and icy, affecting that hoity-toity mid-Atlantic accent actors used to resort to when playing uppercrust roles. Fortunately, she's allowed to loosen up in a scene when she gets drunk and confronts Norma and Darricott at a nightclub. It's not a good drunk scene, but at least it's closer to the free and funny Lombard we cherish. Francis comes across better in a thankless role: She has to pretend to be put off by Darricott's being a gigolo, but then be swept off her feet by him overnight. In short, it's a movie that a lot of top talent, including screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz's, isn't strong enough to save.

 

One Way Passage (Tay Garnett, 1932)

Kay Francis and William Powell in One Way Passage

Cast: William Powell, Kay Francis, Aline MacMahon, Frank McHugh, Warren Hymer, Frederick Burton, Roscoe Karns, Herbert Mundin. Screenplay: Wilson Mizner, Joseph Jackson, Robert Lord. Cinematography: Robert Kurrie. Art direction: Anton Grot. Film editing: Ralph Dawson.

One Way Passage is a small gem that won an Oscar for best story by Robert Lord, though the story is by no means the best thing about it. It is, for example, a prime demonstration of romantic movie chemistry in its teaming of Kay Francis and William Powell. She plays a woman dying of MHM (Mysterious Hollywood Malady), and he's a convicted murderer who is going to be hanged at San Quentin. They meet in a somewhat seedy bar in Hong Kong. She bumps into him and makes him spill his drink, and when they exchange glances it's love at first sight. If you ever want to know what the phrase "acting with the eyes" means, just check out that scene. When they part, they smash their glasses and leave the stems crossed on the bar -- a gesture that becomes a motif through the film, even providing a near-perfect ending for it. They meet again soon, boarding a ship bound for San Francisco, though she's accompanied by her doctor (Frederick Burton) and he by the cop (Warren Hymer) taking him to his doom. The rest is just a matter of working out ways to keep their fatal secrets from each other as their romance blossoms. And if that were all there were to it, One Way Passage really wouldn't be much of a movie. Fortunately, there's as much larceny as love on board, with the introduction of con artist Barrel House Betty (the wonderful Aline MacMahon), who is posing as the Comtesse Barilhaus and is aided by a lightfingered lush known as Skippy (Frank McHugh); they seem to have fleeced their way around the world. A romance even develops between Betty and the cop as a comic counterpart to the main one. The screenplay by Wilson Mizner (who was something of a con artist himself) and Joseph Jackson gives us some salty tough talk dialogue to offset the romantic melodrama of the main plot. (Mizner and Jackson probably deserved the Oscar at least as much as Lord, but at the time, the Academy treated story and screenplay as two discrete categories.) The Production Code would probably have forced the screenwriters to tell us more about the murder Powell's character committed, but all we get is a suggestion that the victim had it coming to him. That everything in the movie comes in at only a little over an hour -- 67 minutes -- is another reason to cherish One Way Passage.

 

Jewel Robbery (William Dieterle, 1932)

Kay Francis and William Powell in Jewel Robbery

Cast: William Powell, Kay Francis, Helen Vinson, Hardie Albright, Alan Mowbray, André Luguet, Henry Kolker, Spencer Charters, Lee Kohlmar, Clarence Wilson. Screenplay: Erwin Gelsey, based on a play by Ladislas Fodor and a translation by Bertram Bloch. Cinematography: Robert Kurrle. Art direction: Robert M. Haas. Film editing: Ralph Dawson. Music: Bernhard Kaun.

Jewel Robbery is a perfect storm of what would be taboos under the Production Code: Not only does it condone adultery and let crime go unpunished, but it also allows William Powell's jewel thief -- pardon me, robber -- to slip a cigarette laced with an uncommonly potent strain of cannabis to the jewelry store guard, thereby violating the forthcoming ban on drug references in movies. (We are assured that, after a case of the giggles, the guard will fall sound asleep to wake refreshed with no hangover but the munchies.) The adulteress is Baroness Teri (Kay Francis), a golddigger who has married the aging Baron von Horhenfels (Henry Kolker) for his money, while carrying on a liaison with the much younger cabinet member Paul (Hardie Albright). Unfortunately, as Teri tells her confidante Marianne (Helen Vinson), Paul is a bit of a bore. She makes the best of it, however, swanning around in gowns designed by Orry-Kelly that defy the law of gravity and raking in the jewels her husband provides. Which leads her to the jewelry store that is about to be robbed and to the robber himself, with whom she swiftly falls in love. The rest is a story of crime and absence of punishment that ends well for Teri and her thief -- uh, robber. Francis and Powell were never better, and there's a good deal of charm and wit to the film. It could have been directed with a lighter touch: William Dieterle is better known for the somewhat stuffy biopics The Story of Louis Pasteur (1935), The Life of Emile Zola (1937), and Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (1940), and he doesn't have the Viennese insouciance that the script needs. But he lets his actors provide that, with good results.

Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932)

Kay Francis, Miriam Hopkins, and Herbert Marshall in Trouble in Paradise

Cast: Miriam Hopkins, Kay Francis, Herbert Marshall, Charles Ruggles, Edward Everett Horton, C. Aubrey Smith, Robert Greig. Screenplay: Samson Raphaelson, Grover Jones, based on a play by Aladar Laszlo. Cinematography: Victor Milner. Art direction: Hans Dreier. Music: W. Franke Harling. Costume design: Travis Banton.

If you want a good example of the damage done to American movies by the enforcement of the Production Code, look no further than Trouble in Paradise. Ernst Lubitsch's comic masterpiece could not have been made two years later, when the Code went into effect. It could not even be re-released or shown commercially until the death of the Code in the late 1960s. The loss to the art of cinema is incalculable, even though filmmakers including Lubitsch went on to find other ways of being witty and sexy. On the face of it, Trouble in Paradise sounds trivial: Con artists Lily (Miriam Hopkins) and Gaston (Herbert Marshall) fall in love when each tries to filch the other's belongings: a wallet, a brooch, a watch, a garter. So they team up and go off to Paris where their target becomes the wealthy and beautiful Mariette Colet (Kay Francis), owner of a leading parfumerie. What will happen to Lily when Gaston falls in love with Mariette? What makes it work is Lubitsch's unflagging wit: A film that will soon be wafting the scent of Mme. Colet's perfume opens with a Venetian garbage man dumping the contents of a can into a loaded garbage scow and punting off into a canal singing "O Sole Mio." It's only the first of the many Lubitsch touches. But perhaps the greatest touch of all is the casting: Hopkins was never funnier or sexier and Francis never more radiant. I have to admit that on my first viewing I was initially put off by the casting of Marshall: a sad-eyed, somewhat slumped middle-aged man with a wooden leg. (The scenes in which Gaston sprints up and down Mariette's staircase are probably the work of a body double.) But Marshall turns out to be perfectly charming in the role, credibly wooing both leading ladies. A heartthrob like Cary Grant would have wrecked the chemistry, becoming the apex of what needs to be an equilateral triangle. William Powell would have been too vivid in the part, echoing his previous teamings with Francis. Fredric March had a touch too much of the ham -- Marshall succeeds by underplaying the role. There are some other nice surprises: Those peerless character actors Charles Ruggles and Edward Everett Horton were usually used as comic relief, but Trouble in Paradise is a comedy that needs no relieving; Ruggles and Horton are there to do their own thing and they do it well. The ending, which flouts a key commandment of the Code, is suitably bittersweet, but paradise needs a little trouble to make you appreciate it the more.

Mandalay (Michael Curtiz, 1934)

Kay Francis, Warner Oland, and Ricardo Cortez in Mandalay

 Cast: Kay Francis, Ricardo Cortez, Warner Oland, Lyle Talbot, Ruth Donnelly, Lucien Littlefield, Reginald Owen, Etienne Giardot, David Torrence, Rafaela Ottiano, Halliwell Hobbes, Bodil Rosing, Herman Bing. Screenplay: Paul Hervey Fox, Austin Parker, Charles King. Cinematography: Tony Gaudio. Art direction: Anton Grot. Film editing: Thomas Pratt. Music: Heinz Roemheld.

You get what you might expect from a movie titled Mandalay: Orientalist hooey, with lots of gun-running and opium dealing in sleazy night clubs, with expat Europeans and Americans fleecing tourists with the aide of sinister Eurasians. (There was no other kind of Eurasian in Hollywood movies of the '30s; here they're played by Warner Oland, who made a career of the type before going straight into yellowface as Charlie Chan, and Rafaela Ottiano, who filled the bill whenever Gale Sondergaard was unavailable.) Kay Francis does what she can with a role that doesn't make a lot of sense: She's the Russian-born Tanya Borodoff, who has somehow fallen in love with Tony Evans (Ricardo Cortez), a gun-runner and all-around heel. When he dumps her, she becomes Spot White (no, I don't get the name either), the madam of the sleazy night club in Rangoon run by Nick (Oland). She doesn't want to fall that far from grace, but needs must. When she's threatened with deportation to Russia by the police commissioner (Reginald Owen), she blackmails him by reminding him that they once had a night together when he was drunk, and that she has her garter adorned with his medals to prove it. He gives her the money she needs to leave Rangoon and head for the "cool green hills" near Mandalay. Now calling herself Marjorie Lang, she boards a paddle-wheel steamer upriver, on which she meets an alcoholic doctor (Lyle Talbot) who intends to atone for accidentally killing a patient by working with black fever patients in the jungles. They hit it off and she helps him sober up, but, wouldn't you know it, Tony Evans resurfaces on the very steamer. This sounds like a lot more fun than it is, although Michael Curtiz's professionalism and Tony Gaudio's cinematography gives it some occasional finesse. Francis slinks about nicely -- a woman passenger tells her, "You certainly can wear clothes" -- but she doesn't have the spark she fires in her best roles, perhaps because Cortez and Talbot are such dull leading men. The ending is the sort of thing that would have the heads of the Production Code enforcers exploding, but even that isn't enough for me to recommend sitting through the rest of the movie.

Man Wanted (William Dieterle, 1932)

David Manners and Kay Francis in Man Wanted

Cast: Kay Francis, David Manners, Una Merkel, Andy Devine, Kenneth Thomson, Claire Dodd, Elizabeth Patterson, Edward Van Sloan. Screenplay: Robert Lord, Charles Kenyon. Cinematography: Gregg Toland. Art direction: Anton Grot. Film editing: James Gibbon. Music: Bernhard Kaun.

Man Wanted is an arch, sophisticated romantic comedy that needed an Ernst Lubitsch to handle its racy moments and a Howard Hawks to handle its snappy dialogue. William Dieterle was a good director, but he was neither of those men, so the movie feels slow when it should be lively, choppy when it should be speedy. The premise is this: Lois (Kay Francis) is a high-powered career woman, the editor of a magazine, married to a wealthy playboy (Kenneth Thomson) who cares more about playing polo and chasing other women than he does about their marriage. So when Tom (David Manners), a salesman for exercise equipment, pays a sales call on Lois and reveals that he knows shorthand -- from taking notes in his classes at Harvard -- he gets hired to replace the secretary she has just fired. You can fill in the rest. Francis carries a lot of the film on charm, even when the situations feel over-familiar and the dialogue doesn't sparkle the way it should. Check out her work for Lubitsch in Trouble in Paradise, made the same year as this film, to see what might have been. Manners, best known today for his work in the horror movies Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931), The Mummy (Karl Freund, 1932), and The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934), is a pleasantly forgettable leading man, and Andy Devine and Una Merkel are miscast as Tom's buddy and girlfriend, providing comic relief that doesn't quite relieve. 

Raffles (George Fitzmaurice, 1930)

Kay Francis and Ronald Colman in Raffles

Cast: Ronald Colman, Kay Francis, David Torrence, Frederick Kerr, Bramwell Fletcher, Alison Skipworth, John Rogers, Wilson Benge, Frances Dade. Screenplay: Sidney Howard, based on a novel by E.W. Hornung and a play by Eugene Wiley Presbrey. Cinematography: George Barnes, Gregg Toland. Art direction: Park French, William Cameron Menzies. Film editing: Stuart Heisler.

Samuel Goldwyn's 1930 version of the old chestnut Raffles, about a gentleman jewel thief known as "the amateur cracksman," was reportedly made as both as a silent film and a talkie simultaneously. It's easy to spot scenes that would work in both versions, such as the one in which Raffles (Ronald Colman) woos Gwen (Kay Francis) in an automobile: We see them through the windshield, but we don't hear what they're saying -- just the sound of the engine running. Colman was one of the silent stars who made the transition to talkies easily, possessing not only good looks but also a speaking voice to match, and his performance in Raffles looks and sounds natural and easy-going. The film, unfortunately, still suffers from some of the sluggishness of early talkies, with dialogue that doesn't flow but chugs along, with pauses between lines that feel as if they're waiting for a title card to be inserted. It's a pre-Production Code film, so Raffles doesn't have to be punished for his crimes at the end -- he simply escapes, with the Scotland Yard inspector who has almost nabbed him admitting in the film's curtain line, "One can't help liking him." The movie was nominated for an Oscar for sound recording, and the nominee, Oscar Lagerstrom, was attentive to background noises like footsteps and car engines, though the version of the film available today is notable for the rumbles and whispers of the soundtrack, unsweetened by a music score.

In Name Only (John Cromwell, 1939)

In Name Only (John Cromwell, 1939)

Cast: Cary Grant, Carole Lombard, Kay Francis, Charles Coburn, Helen Vinson, Katharine Alexander, Jonathan Hale, Nella Walker, Alan Baxter, Maurice Moscovitch, Peggy Ann Garner, Spencer Charters. Screenplay: Richard Sherman, based on a novel by Bessie Breuer. Cinematography: J. Roy Hunt. Art direction: Van Nest Polglase, Perry Ferguson. Film editing: William Hamilton. Music: Roy Webb.

You have to feel a little sorry for Kay Francis in In Name Only, stuck there as the villain opposite two witty luminaries, Cary Grant and Carole Lombard. Their background as comic actors make Grant and Lombard even more appealing in this mostly serious drama about frustrated love. We see the potential for happiness in their characters even as Lombard's is suffering and Grant's almost dies, mostly because we've seen the actors be giddy and funny before. Poor Francis is stuck in full grim glower as her character, Maida Walker, tries to hold on to her husband, Alec (Grant), and it doesn't help that we have seen Francis be funny before, in Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise (1932), though even there she was the other woman to Miriam Hopkins. Maida's motives are impure, of course: She married Alec for his money, even though she was in love with another, less affluent man. Their marriage has long since gone sour, so when Alec finds himself falling for the pretty widow Julie Eden (Lombard), Maida has to pull out all stops to put a kibosh on their affair. In Name Only is one of the more cynical movies about marriage to come out of Hollywood under the Production Code, which while it didn't prohibit the treatment of married couples falling out of love with each other and even getting divorced to marry their true loves, tried, under the Catholic leadership of Joseph Breen, to discourage it -- or at least to make sure that it was as painful for the participants as possible. So Maida has to be as cunningly deceitful as possible in her attempts to hold on to her man, and other marriages in the movie are just as unhappy: Maida's friend Suzanne (Helen Vinson) is married to a lush, so she plays the field, making a stab at Alec, and Julie has an embittered sister, Laura (Katharine Alexander), who divorced her philandering husband and now distrusts all men. Naturally, in the end Maida gets her comeuppance and agrees to divorce Alec so he can marry Julie, but it's a long time coming. Alec even has to be on the brink of death before this can happen, which provides one of the weaker moments in the film: Grant is so typically full of life that it's almost beyond his considerable acting skills to seem to be seriously ill. In Name Only is no great film, but you probably can't even care about its defects when Grant and Lombard are on the screen -- they're that good.

Trouble in Paradise (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932)

Miriam Hopkins and Herbert Marshall in Trouble in Paradise

Lily: Miriam Hopkins
Mariette Colet: Kay Francis
Gaston Monescu: Herbert Marshall
The Major: Charles Ruggles
François Filiba: Edward Everett Horton
Adolph J. Giron: C. Aubrey Smith
Jacques: Robert Greig

Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Screenplay: Samson Raphaelson, Grover Jones
Based on a play by Aladar Laszlo
Cinematography: Victor Milner
Art direction: Hans Dreier
Costume design: Travis Banton
Music: W. Franke Harling

It's a measure of the stupidity of American censorship that this gemlike sophisticated comedy could not have been made in Hollywood two years later, after the Production Code was implemented, but was also withheld from re-release for years afterward, all because it dared to indicate that its adult characters were having sex with one another without benefit of clergy and because the blithely larcenous Lily and Gaston were allowed to get off without apparent punishment -- indeed, with considerable reward -- for their crimes. It's essential for anyone who wants to know why Ernst Lubitsch and his so-called "touch" were so highly prized for so long.