Our Modern Maidens (Jack Conway, 1929)

Joan Crawford and Anita Page in Our Modern Maidens

Cast: Joan Crawford, Rod La Rocque, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Anita Page, Edward J. Nugent, Josephine Dunn, Albert Gran. Screenplay: Josephine Lovett, titles by Marian Ainslee, Ruth Cummings. Cinematography: Oliver T. Marsh. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Sam Zimbalist. Music: Arthur Lange. 

Cedric Gibbons got a lot of credit for designs he didn't do: His name was listed as art director on almost all of MGM's movies from 1925, when he joined the studio, through 1956, when he retired, but largely because he was head of the art department; the actual hands-on design work on any given film was probably that of the person listed along with Gibbons, usually as assistant art director. That said, I think it's almost a sure thing that the set designs for Our Modern Maidens were done by Gibbons himself: The giveaway is that they're a splendidly, almost over-the-top art deco, a style associated with Gibbons, which influenced even his most famous design: the Oscar statuette. The décor of B. Bickering Brown's mansion is a fabulous assemblage of deco staircases, columns, cornices, and whatnots, an almost cubist setting for Billie Brown (Joan Crawford) to sashay about in, wearing designs by Adrian. The truth is, the movie needs the boost it gets from the design, given that the story is a fairly banal account of modern maidens Billie and Kentucky (Anita Page) in dangerous liaisons designed to point the moral: Don't get too modern when it comes to sex. Billie, who has her fling at several wild parties, gets secretly engaged to Gil (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.), who has a little thing going with Kentucky, but when Billie meets Glenn Abbott (Rod La Rocque), things get complicated. She flirts with Abbott, who has connections in the state department, to get Gil posted to the embassy in Paris, but breaks off with Abbott when he gets a little too hot and bothered. Then, on her wedding day, she learns that Kentucky is pregnant with Gil's child, and she realizes that she really loves Abbott. Not to worry, he'll forgive her. This was Crawford's last silent film, and it's not entirely silent: Leo roars over the MGM logo, there's a music soundtrack, some sound effects and crowd noises, and once we hear a public announcement over a loudspeaker. It's not quite as entertaining as the movie to which it's a sequel, Harry Beaumont's 1928 Our Dancing Daughters, which also starred Crawford and Page, but it holds the eye if not the mind. 

The Smart Set (Jack Conway, 1928)

William Haines in The Smart Set

Cast: William Haines, Jack Holt, Alice Day, Hobart Bosworth, Coy Watson, Constance Howard, Paul Nicholson, Julia Swayne Gordon. Screenplay: Byron Morgan, Ann Price; titles: Robert E. Hopkins. Cinematography: Oliver T. Marsh. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Merrill Pye. Film editing: Sam Zimbalist.

Given that we now know what everyone in Hollywood knew at the time, namely that William Haines was one of the few openly gay leading men of the 1920s and '30s, it's fascinating to watch how he camps up the role of Tommy Van Buren in The Smart Set. Haines mugs, poses, and generally upstages everyone in the film -- and gets away with it, considering that his performance is almost the only entertaining thing about this silly romantic comedy. Tommy is a conceited champion polo player, and the plot, such as it is, deals with his self-centered sabotage of the United States polo team in a match against the British, and his developing relationship with the pretty Polly Durant (Alice Day), the daughter of a wealthy owner of polo ponies. Does Tommy come to his senses and save the day at the film's end, winning the game and Polly, too? What do you think?

Faithless (Harry Beaumont, 1932)

Robert Montgomery and Tallulah Bankhead in Faithless

Cast: Tallulah Bankhead, Robert Montgomery, Hugh Herbert, Maurice Murphy, Louise Closser Hale, Anna Appel, Lawrence Grant, Henry Kolker. Screenplay: Carey Wilson, based on a novel by Mildred Cram. Cinematography: Oliver T. Marsh. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Hugh Wynn. Costume design: Adrian.

Faithless is a pretty good demonstration of why Tallulah Bankhead failed to become a major Hollywood star. It has a standard weepie plot: Rich girl loses her money in the Depression, becomes the mistress of a wealthy man, breaks with him when a former boyfriend discovers their relationship, reconciles with the boyfriend and marries him, but when he's injured in an accident finds that prostitution is the only way she can pay his medical bills; rescued from a life on the streets by a kindly cop, she confesses to her husband, who forgives her. The trouble is that Bankhead is not a sufferer; she's too tough and clever to play a role that should have gone to the likes of Janet Gaynor or Ruth Chatterton. The film is chiefly of interest as an example of what Hollywood could get away with before the Production Code. It's also interesting to see comic actor Hugh Herbert cast (wrongly) in a serious role as the man whose mistress Bankhead becomes.

A Tale of Two Cities (Jack Conway, 1935)

Cast: Ronald Colman, Elizabeth Allan, Edna May Oliver, Reginald Owen, Basil Rathbone, Blanche Yurka, Henry B. Walthall, Donald Woods, Walter Catlett, Fritz Leiber, H.B. Warner, Mitchell Lewis, Claude Gillingwater, Billy Bevan, Isabel Jewell, Lucille La Verne. Screenplay: W.P. Lipscomb, S.N. Behrman, based on a novel by Charles Dickens. Cinematography: Oliver T. Marsh. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Fredric Hope, Edwin B. Willis. Film editing: Conrad A. Nervig. Music: Herbert Stothart.

It was the best of movies, it was the worst of movies. The best part is that Ronald Colman is a handsome Sydney Carton, who delivers the familiar closing line at the guillotine -- "It is a far, far better thing I do...." -- with the necessary nobility, and that the cast includes such ever-watchable character actors as Edna May Oliver, Basil Rathbone, Blanche Yurka (an implacable Mme. De Farge), and Lucille La Verne (as The Vengeance, literally but not figuratively toothless). The worst part is that the screenplay leans heavily on the sentimental parts of the novel and Elizabeth Allan is, like most Dickens heroines, a pallid and forgettable Lucie Manette. David O. Selznick produced, but it's not as successful a foray into Dickens as his superb David Copperfield, made the same year and with a better director, George Cukor. 

Arsène Lupin (Jack Conway, 1932)

Cast: John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Karen Morley, John Miljan, Tully Marshall. Screenplay: Lenore J. Coffee, Bayard Veiller, Carey Wilson, based on a play by Maurice Leblanc and Francis de Croisset. Cinematography: Oliver T. Marsh. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Costume design: Adrian. Film editing: Hugh Wynn.

The brothers Barrymore do some delightful upstaging of each other in Arsène Lupin, with John as the suave duke whom Lionel as the dogged police inspector suspects of being the thief known as Arsène Lupin. There's some sexy business involving Karen Morley as a socialite who may be more than what she seems, and everything culminates in the theft of the Mona Lisa. It's maybe a little more creaky in its joints than is good for it, in the way of early talkies.

Dancing Lady (Robert Z. Leonard, 1933)

Dancing Lady (Robert Z. Leonard, 1933)

Cast: Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Franchot Tone, Fred Astaire, Ted Healy, Moe Howard, Curly Howard, Larry Fine, Robert Benchley, Arthur Jarrett, May Robson, Nelson Eddy. Screenplay: Allen Rivkin, P.J. Wolfson. Cinematography: Oliver T. Marsh. Art direction: Merrill Pye. Film editing: Margaret Booth. Music: Maurice De Packh, Louis Silvers.

Possessed (Clarence Brown, 1931)

 Possessed (Clarence Brown, 1931)

Cast: Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Wallace Ford, Richard "Skeets" Gallagher, Frank Conroy, Marjorie White, John Miljan, Clara Blandick. Screenplay: Lenore J. Coffee, based on a play by Edgar Selwyn. Cinematography: Oliver T. Marsh. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Costume design: Adrian. Music: Charles Maxwell.

Broadway Melody of 1940 (Norman Taurog, 1940)

Broadway Melody of 1940 (Norman Taurog, 1940)

Cast: Fred Astaire, Eleanor Powell, George Murphy, Frank Morgan, Ian Hunter, Florence Rice. Screenplay: Leon Gordon, George Oppenheimer, Jack McGowan, Dore Schary. Cinematography: Oliver T. Marsh, Joseph Ruttenberg. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Blanche Sewell. Songs: Cole Porter.

Sadie Thompson (Raoul Walsh, 1928)

It's sad that most people know Gloria Swanson only as the gorgon Norma Desmond in Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder, 1957). Or that Swanson's deft parody of silent movie acting in that film constitutes many people's impression of what it was like. The survival of Sadie Thompson, even though it's missing its last reel, which the restorers piece out with old stills and title cards, shows what a formidable force Swanson could be on screen, generating enough heat that it's surprising she didn't ignite the nitrate film stock. The story is the familiar one of the San Francisco prostitute who comes to Pago Pago, where she clashes with a bluenose reformer who threatens to return her to San Francisco and the hands of the police. The reformer is Alfred Davidson (Lionel Barrymore in full ham), who was a clergyman in Somerset Maugham's short story, "Miss Thompson," and the play, Rain, that was based on it, but becomes a layman here to please the Hays Office. Fortunately, Sadie has the support of a sturdy young Marine sergeant, Timothy O'Hara, played by director Raoul Walsh, who before turning director full-time had been an actor in the early days of silents; he played John Wilkes Booth in The Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915). This brief return to acting was a one-shot: Walsh was planning to direct himself again in In Old Arizona (Irving Cummings, 1928), but lost his right eye in a freak auto accident while on location preparing to shoot the film; Warner Baxter took over the role and won an Oscar for it. Swanson was nominated for an Oscar for Sadie Thompson, as was cinematographer George Barnes, whose nomination included his work on two other films: The Devil Dancer (Fred Niblo, 1927) and The Magic Flame (Henry King, 1927). In fact, Barnes did only a week's worth of filming on Sadie Thompson before Samuel Goldwyn insisted he fulfill a contractual obligation to him; he was replaced by Robert Kurrle and Oliver T. Marsh.