Doctor X (Michael Curtiz, 1932)

Lionel Atwill in Doctor X

Cast: Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, Lee Tracy, Preston Foster, John Wray, Harry Beresford, Arthur Edmund Carewe, Leila Bennett, Robert Warwick, George Rosener, Willard Robertson, Thomas E. Jackson, Harry Holman, Mae Busch, Tom Dugan. Screenplay: Robert Taskner, Earl Baldwin, based on a play by Howard Warren Comstock and Allen C. Miller. Cinematography: Ray Rennahan. Art direction: Anton Grot. Film editing: George Amy.

In Doctor X, Lee Tracy is called on to do two incompatible things: serve as comic relief and play the romantic lead. He succeeds at the former more than he does at the latter, which is not saying much.  (The comic shtick involves things like joy buzzers and exploding cigars, which gives you a sense of the level of humor Tracy is asked to participate in.) The film is a whodunit horror about a serial killer who strikes at the full moon and who leaves his victims mutilated. (The movie calls it cannibalism, but I don't recall any evidence that the killer actually ate the people he murdered.) The chief forensic clue is that the victims were sliced up with a particular kind of scalpel, used only by one facility in the city: a research institute headed by Dr. Jerry Xavier (Lionel Atwill). When the police detectives call on Xavier, they are introduced to his research staff, each of whom becomes a suspect in the killings. Meanwhile, Lee Taylor (Tracy), one of those anything-for-a-story reporters Hollywood was fond of, is snooping around too, trying to uncover the Full Moon Killer before the police do. This involves Taylor breaking and entering at not only the institute but also Dr. Xavier's creepy gothic mansion on a cliff in Long Island, where he lurks around in some skeleton-filled closets. (Cue the obvious gags.) He also meets Dr. Xavier's lovely daughter, Joanne (Fay Wray), and they inexplicably (at least where she's concerned) hit it off. Naturally, Joanne has to be put in jeopardy and Taylor has to rescue her. Doctor X is mostly remembered for its experiment with two-strip Technicolor, which yields some interesting if washed-out looking images, but also seems inappropriate for the film's sinister old dark house setting. There are a few nice scares among all the goofiness and pseudo-scientific poppycock -- the usual foaming and smoking beakers and flasks and some sparking and arcing electric apparatus -- but in a golden age for horror movies, Doctor X is decidedly second-tier.  

The Devil Is a Woman (Josef von Sternberg, 1935)

Marlene Dietrich in The Devil Is a Woman

Concha Perez: Marlene Dietrich
Capt. Don Pasqual "Pasqualito" Costelar: Lionel Atwill
Antonio Galvan: Cesar Romero
Gov. Don Paquito "Paquitito": Edward Everett Horton
Señora Perez: Alison Skipworth
Morenito: Don Alvarado
Tuerta: Tempe Pigott
Alphonso: Francisco Moreno

Director: Josef von Sternberg
Screenplay: John Dos Passos, Sam Winston, David Hertz, Oran Schee
Based on a novel by Pierre Louÿs
Cinematography: Josef von Sternberg
Art direction: Hans Dreier, Josef von Sternberg
Film editing: Sam Winston
Costume design: Travis Banton
Music: John Leipold, Hans Roemheld

Josef von Sternberg wanted to give The Devil Is a Woman the title of the music by Rimsky-Korsakov on which the film's score is based, Capriccio Espagnol, but studio head Ernst Lubitsch overruled him. The decision probably helped the movie a little at the box office -- though it was a flop that ended Sternberg's career at Paramount as well as helping Dietrich get stigmatized as "box office poison" in an infamous complaint by a distributor. But The Devil Is a Woman really is a "Spanish caprice," a film that has about as much to do with its ostensible setting, Spain, as the earlier Sternberg-Dietrich films Morocco (1930), Shanghai Express (1932), and The Scarlet Empress (1934) had to do with North Africa, China, and Russia. They are products of Steinberg's fevered imagination, with baroque settings designed by Hans Dreier in which Marlene Dietrich could wear impossible gowns by Travis Banton. The 1930s moviegoing public may have tired of Sternberg's idiosyncratic melodramas, but they have stood the test of time as consummate expressions of what the Hollywood studio system could do if it gave free rein to one man's tastes and obsessions. Like Sternberg's first film starring Dietrich, The Blue Angel (1930), The Devil Is a Woman is about masochism, though the same could be said about all of the other films he made with her. In this one, she's Concha Perez, who leads a Spanish officer she calls Pasqualito on a merry-go-round of erotic entanglements, snaring him and deserting him repeatedly. And though Don Pasqual seems to have come to his senses enough to tell his story as a warning to a young political fugitive, Antonio Galvan, who has fallen for her, Concha returns to play with them again. None of this is remotely credible in any realistic context, which is why the Sternberg-Dreier-Banton concoction of a fantastic Spain is essential. The film thus becomes both silly and sublime and, with Sternberg in charge of everything but its title, one of the purest expressions of a director's sensibility available.

The Age of Innocence (Philip Moeller, 1934)

John Boles and Irene Dunne in The Age of Innocence

Countess Ellen Olenska: Irene Dunne
Newland Archer: John Boles
Julius Beaufort: Lionel Atwill
Granny Mingott: Helen Westley
Augusta Welland: Laura Hope Crews
May Welland: Julie Haydon
Howard Welland: Herbert Yost
Mrs. Archer: Theresa Maxwell Conover
Jane Archer: Edith Van Cleve
The Butler: Leonard Carey

Director: Philip Moeller
Screenplay: Sarah Y. Mason, Victor Heerman
Based on a novel by Edith Wharton and a play adapted from it by Margaret Ayer Barnes
Cinematography: James Van Trees
Art direction: Alfred Herman, Van Nest Polglase
Music: Max Steiner

The fine ironic edges of Edith Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel have been filed down in this first sound version. (There had been a silent film based on the book, directed by Wesley Ruggles, in 1924.) Instead we get a rather soppy melodrama of forbidden love, which suggests that marital vows and family commitments are unbreakable -- an endorsement of old-fashioned values quite in line with the nascent Production Code, introduced in the year of the film's release. The movie opens with a montage of "modern times" replete with jazz and scandals, as if to drive home its message. It's further weakened by the casting of the ladylike Irene Dunne as the scandalous Ellen Olenska. The actress who turned the part down, Katharine Hepburn, might at least have brought a whiff of the unconventional to the role. Dunne tries to give Ellen a spark of life at the start, but after Newland Archer enters the picture and declares his love in spite of his engagement to May Welland, we are presented with Dunne's distant gazes and wistful looks. It doesn't help that John Boles is starchy and vapid as Newland, or that Julie Haydon's May Welland is a sugary ingenue, with no hint of the manipulative until the very end when she plays the pregnancy card. The only real life in the cast is supplied by the supporting players, particularly Laura Hope Crews, eschewing her usual fluttery mannerisms as as May's mother, and Helen Westley, providing some salt and vinegar as Granny Mingott.