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. 

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 Royal Scandal (Otto Preminger, 1946)

Charles Coburn, William Eythe, and Tallulah Bankhead in A Royal Scandal

Catherine the Great: Tallulah Bankhead
Chancellor Nicolai Ilyitch: Charles Coburn
Lt. Alexei Chernoff: William Eythe
Countess Anna Jaschikoff: Anne Baxter
Marquis de Fleury: Vincent Price
Capt. Sukov: Mischa Auer
Gen. Ronsky: Sig Ruman

Director: Otto Preminger
Screenplay: Edwin Justus Mayer, Bruno Frank
Based on a play by Lajos Biró and Melchior Lengyel
Cinematography: Arthur C. Miller
Costume design: René Hubert

Sometimes it's better not to know too much about a movie, for example the fact that A Royal Scandal was to be directed by Ernst Lubitsch and Greta Garbo almost made one of her many rumored comebacks as Catherine the Great. Might have been tends to distract us from what was: a more-than-passable comedy about the goings-on in the court of the Empress of all the Russias. It was a notorious flop, however, and essentially ended any hopes Tallulah Bankhead might have had for screen stardom after her much-praised performance in Lifeboat (Alfred Hitchcock, 1944). The film was savaged by the often unreliable but enormously influential Bosley Crowther in the New York Times: He called it "oddly dull and generally witless," though he faulted the script rather than Bankhead and the cast. I still think that if you go into A Royal Scandal with diminished expectations, you can find some fun in it. True, the script drags a little, and the central palace intrigue -- a plot to overthrow the empress -- is rather muddled in the setup. But it has some clever lines, and it has Bankhead and Charles Coburn to deliver them. William Eythe, a kind of second-string Tyrone Power, handles well his role as the naive soldier captivated by the empress, showing some shrewd comic timing, and Anne Baxter, as his fiancee and Catherine's lady-in-waiting, represses her tendency to overact. The faults in the film are generally more due to the director than the script. In Lubitsch's hands the romance might have been wittier and the comic-opera complications of the plot more effervescent. Otto Preminger, who took over after Lubitsch suffered a heart attack, was not the man for the job. As he showed with his first big hit, Laura (1944), Preminger was greatly gifted at handling scheming nasties and noirish perversities, but he was never one for costume-drama frivolities. What success he has with A Royal Scandal comes from giving a capable cast the reins.

Filmstruck

Lifeboat (Alfred Hitchcock, 1944)

Lifeboat has two things going for it: Alfred Hitchcock and Tallulah Bankhead. Otherwise, it could easily have turned into either a routine survival melodrama or, worse, a didactic allegory about the human condition. As it is, elements of both remain. The situation -- a small group of survivors of a merchant marine vessel torpedoed by a German U-boat confront the elements, their own frailties, and the U-boat captain they unwittingly help rescue -- was dreamed up by Hitchcock and was assigned to John Steinbeck to come up with a story. It was then turned into a screenplay by Jo Swerling, with the uncredited help of a number of other hands, including Ben Hecht and Hitchcock's wife, Alma Reville. Steinbeck is said to have hated it, partly because the screenplay was purged of his leftist point of view, but anyone familiar with his fiction can see how the script's avoidance of his tendency to preach strengthened the film. And the casting of Bankhead, in what is virtually her only good screen role, adds a note of sophisticated sass that the melodrama desperately needs. Steinbeck also objected that the character of Joe (Canada Lee), the ship's steward and the only black survivor, had been turned into a "stock comedy Negro," which is hardly fair: Although there are unpleasant taints of Hollywood racism in the characterization -- Bankhead's character refers to him as "Charcoal" a couple of times -- Joe is generally treated with respect. At one point, when the occupants of the lifeboat decide to put something to a vote, Joe asks, with more than a touch of sad experience behind the question, "Do I get to vote, too?" And when the survivors finally turn in a frenzy on the treacherous German (Walter Slezak), clubbing him to death and drowning him, Joe is the only one who seems to recognize that what they're doing is essentially a lynching; he tries to dissuade Alice (Mary Anderson), the U.S. Army nurse, from joining the assault. (Of course, it's also possible that the studio feared that having a black man assault a white man would outrage Southern audiences.) While it's not prime Hitchcock, Lifeboat is engaging and entertaining, and a cut above most wartime melodramas, partly because it dares to present the enemy, the German captain, as dangerous, cleverly outwitting and manipulating the Americans and Brits in the boat -- which naturally outraged some of the flag-waving critics.