Little Women (George Cukor, 1933)

Little Women (George Cukor, 1933)

Cast: Katharine Hepburn, Joan Bennett, Jean Parker, Frances Dee, Spring Byington, Paul Lukas, Henry Stephenson, Douglass Montgomery, Edna May Oliver, John Lodge. Screenplay: Sarah Y. Mason, Victor Heerman, based on a novel by Louisa May Alcott. Cinematography: Henry W. Gerrard. Art direction: Van Nest Polglase. Film editing: Jack Kitchin. Music: Max Steiner.

Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937)

Barbara O'Neil and Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas

Stella Dallas: Barbara Stanwyck
Stephen Dallas: John Boles
Laurel Dallas: Anne Shirley
Helen Morrison: Barbara O'Neil
Ed Munn: Alan Hale
Mrs. Martin: Marjorie Main
Charlie Martin: George Walcott
Miss Phillibrown: Ann Shoemaker
Richard Grosvenor: Tim Holt

Director: King Vidor
Screenplay: Sarah Y. Mason, Victor Heerman
Based on a novel by Olive Higgins Prouty and its dramatization by Harry Wagstaff Gribble and Gertrude Purcell
Cinematography: Rudolph Maté
Art direction: Richard Day
Film editing: Sherman Todd
Costume design: Omar Kiam
Music: Alfred Newman

I'm bothered by an inconsistency in the title character of King Vidor's Stella Dallas. When Stella's estranged husband, Stephen, shows up unexpectedly at Christmastime bearing gifts for her and their daughter, Laurel, Stella makes a determined effort to look "respectable": She rummages through her closet, rejecting all the flowery, overtrimmed dresses she usually favors, and chooses a black dress, removing most of its trimmings, and even goes so far as to wipe off the lipstick she has just applied. But later, when she takes Laurel to a snooty resort, she's a blowsy horror again, swaggering vulgarly through the amused upperclass crowd -- and thereby precipitating the final separation between her and Laurel. What happened to the self-aware Stella who knew how to present herself as a suitable mate for Stephen Dallas? But the thing about this inconsistency, and other little melodramatic clichés that infest the film, is that it doesn't matter: Stella Dallas triumphs because Barbara Stanwyck believes in her and because King Vidor knows how to manipulate our responses to the characters. Stella's appearance at the resort is played as simultaneously comic -- who doesn't laugh at the way she's dressed, swanning around with a white fox fur? -- and tragic -- Stella's insistence on being herself is her fatal flaw. Similarly, when Ed Munn shows up drunk, wagging around a large turkey he has brought for Stella and Laurel's Christmas and stuffing it head, feet, and all into the oven, the scene is hilarious -- Alan Hale is wonderful here -- until it isn't, until we realize the damage it is going to do to Stella and her daughter. And the celebrated final scene, of Stella watching Laurel's wedding through the window, is beautifully performed by Stanwyck, chewing on her handkerchief, and magisterially staged by Vidor. Tears are flowing in the audience as Stella strides across the street, but she's beaming, having accomplished her chief goal: to see Laurel happy. Critiques of the movie's treatment of maternal self-sacrifice, or of marriage as the consummation of a woman's happiness, are many and cogent. But let's just take a moment to reflect on the skill with which these ideas and attitudes, retrograde as we may find them, have been presented on film.

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.