The Helen Vinson Film Festival: "Two Against the World" and "Grand Slam"

"How veddy good of you to cahm!"

Of all the actors and actresses who appeared in 1930s movies, Helen Vinson (1907-99) was certainly one of them.

Born Helen Rulfs in Beaumont, Texas, Vinson was the daughter of an oil company executive and grew up on a country estate. She attended the University of Texas, where she performed in shows, and ended up doing little theatre in Houston. This led to Broadway, a name change, and then Hollywood, where in 1932 Vinson went to work at Warner Bros.

Given her upper-class upbringing, playing the high society type came easily to Vinson. She was the opposite of streetwise Warner leading ladies like Glenda Farrell or Joan Blondell -- she was attractive in a demure way and spoke in an achingly proper manner.

One of Vinson's first films at Warner's is the majestic "I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang." Vinson plays Helen, who meets James Allen (Paul Muni) after his first escape from the chain gang. He has changed his identity and built himself a successful engineering career in Chicago, but he is unhappily married to the blackmailing Marie (Glenda Farrell). For once, Vinson is the attractive alternative, but when Allen tries to leave his wife, Marie turns him in to the authorities. This leads to Allen escaping from the gang yet again and returning for a brief visit with Helen in the film's powerful final scene.

"I Am a Fugitive" shows us a warmer, more attractive side of Vinson -- she actually gets to act like a human being as opposed to someone being rude to servants at a cocktail party.

But from then on, Vinson's Hollywood career largely came down to playing one of two types -- the wealthy heroine's best friend or the wealthy heroine's worst friend, the one who was always trying to steal her husband/lover.

For an example, consider 1932's "Two Against the World," set in a world of thoughtless rich people, the Hamilton clan. Here Vinson is Corinne Hamilton Walton, a sociopathic socialite who's preoccupied with important things like gahden pahties. She's married to a rich stiff named George (Alan Mowbray at his stuffiest). But Corinne is not hap-peh; she's been having an aff-aih until her lover breaks up with her because he loves her sister Adell (Constance Bennett).

Adell Hamilton, on the other hand, has set her cap for dashing young man-of-the-people attorney David Norton (Neil Hamilton), and they bond over a lunch of baked beans at Norton's favorite greasy spoon.

Things take a dramatic turn when Adell and Corinne's brother finds a compact on the lover's bed that just happens to have the old Hamilton family crest on it. The brother thinks it belongs to Adell, but he is mistaken, and this leads to an outbreak of frantic eye contact between the two sisters.

The lover ends up getting seriously killed by Corinne and Adell's brother and, in order to save the reputation of her unfaithful sister and her guilty brother, Corinne takes the fall. But the prosecuting attorney is -- David Norton, Mr. Baked Bean of 1932!

This is most of Helen Vinson's performance in
"Two Against the World."

Considering that it's her infidelity that drives the plot, there isn't much of Vinson in "Two Against the World" -- she doesn't even get the satisfaction of shooting her ex-lover! Instead the movie centers around the love story between Adell and Norton (Hamilton was also Bennett's romantic interest in "What Price Hollywood?"). Vinson might as well wear a shirt saying, "I had an affair but all I ended up with is Alan Mowbray." It's not even clear which "two" the title is referring to -- Adell and Norton? The two sisters? The Warner brothers?

How you feel about the 1933 film "Grand Slam" will depend on how funny you find jokes about playing bridge. The film is a product of a time when the card game was the national craze.

Paul Lukas plays Peter, a mild-mannered man of Russian heritage who, everyone tells us, is a genius. He lives happily and simply as a waiter in a Russian restaurant, but one night his fiancee Marcia (Loretta Young) drags him to a bridge game. He masters the moves immediately, because he's a genius, remember? Then he ends up working at Park Avenue party, where a ritzy group including Lola (Vinson) needs a fourth for bridge. Peter steps in and his expertise makes him the life of the pah-ty:

Lola's attention leads to the breakup of Peter and Marcia, and the climax of the movie comes in a bridge match between Peter and the stuffy, self-appointed bridge expert Van Dorn (Ferdinand Gottschalk). Worldwide interest is so intense that once they start playing, time stands still!

"Grand Slam" is a stew -- a tasty one, with bits sprinkled in by Roscoe Karns (also in "Two Against the World") as a wisecracking radio announcer and our old friend Joseph Cawthorn doing his patented grouchy ethnic schtick, but still a stew.

To Vinson, who stood five feet seven inches tall, Hollywood was "an absolute sea of short men," she later told one interviewer. "Robinson, Muni, James Cagney and George Raft all had to stand on boxes when they acted with me."

The sea of short men started drying up in the late 1930s. In 1938 Vinson was in the headlines for divorcing husband Fred Perry, a British tennis champion who'd begun an affair with Marlene Dietrich. Shortly afterward she married socialite-businessman Donald Hardenbrook. Her last film role was in 1944's "The Thin Man Goes Home" and she returned to the East Coast with her husband, where she studied interior design and preferred not to look back at her film career.

"What Price Hollywood," or A Star Is Torn

You can't talk about the 1932 film "What Price Hollywood?" without dishing some Hollywood dirt -- that the plot, for instance, was inspired by the real-life marriage of rising star Colleen Moore and producer John McCormick, or that Lowell Sherman based his portrayal of dipsomaniac director Max Carey on his one-time real-life brother-in-law, John Barrymore.

"What Price Hollywood?" benefits from those anchors in reality. True, the rise of Mary Evans (Constance Bennett) from waitress at the Brown Derby to a movie star billed as "America's Pal" is a little too speedy, and studio mogul Julius Saxe (Gregory Ratoff) is a little too fatherly, but the movie doesn't shy away from satirizing and, in some cases, criticizing Hollywood and its star culture.

We begin in a Hollywood apartment where Mary is simultaneously fantasizing and getting ready for work:


    
(Didja know that the trademark for the short-lived RKO-Pathe partnership was a giant rooster standing in Iceland?)

"You can't see a smile over the radio, Constance
-- allow me to try some bird calls."

Anyway, at the restaurant Mary waits on brilliant-but-boiled director Max Carey (Sherman). He's taken with her looks and spunk and invites her to attend a movie premiere with him -- in a broken-down tin lizzy he just bought as a gag. She ends up wangling a small role in Carey's next picture, and after a rough start she makes good. Then she's signed to a long-term contract and becomes "America's Pal."

The relationship between Mary and Carey remains platonic, but nonetheless he's bothered when Mary falls in love with polo-playing Lonnie Borden (Neil Hamilton). Lonnie's kind of a stuffed shirt, but he does love Mary, and he even goes along with it when their wedding is Hollywood-ized by Saxe and his staff. The result plays like something out of "Day of the Locust":


It doesn't take long, however, before Lonnie starts resenting Mary's career and her loyalty to Carey, who's on a fast downhill slide. When Carey shows up at the house drunk in the middle of the night, Lonnie leaves in a huff -- a 1925 two-door Huff, to badly paraphrase Groucho Marx.

But Mary stays true to Carey, even bailing him out of the drunk tank and bringing him home to recover.

Mary: From tonight on, you're going dry.

Max: From tonight on, I won't cause you any more trouble.  

Mary exits, and Max gets out of bed. Then, in a striking montage co-created by Soviet great Slavko Vorkapitch, he makes some decisions of his own:



Mary's shock at finding Max's body echoes her first movie bit for Max, where she played a party girl who ends up in the same situation. Nicely done.

Max's suicide at Mary's house triggers rumors of a scandal, and her films are boycotted by "upright" women's groups. Mary's only thought is that Lonnie will now challenge her for custody of their young son, so she escapes to Europe. By the end, however, Mary and Lonnie have reunited and there's talk of a comeback film, because if there's anything Hollywood loves more than a fall from grace it's forgiving the fallen woman (see Bergman, Ingrid).

There are other nice little touches in "What Price Hollywood?," including this exchange between Mary and Saxe about her next film:

Mary: I don't think I should have a baby in every picture I do.

Saxe: This one is different -- you're getting married first!     

Ratoff, with his heavy Russian accent, is part parody and part perfect as Saxe -- in one scene he sits at his massive desk and nurses his ulcer with a bowl of crackers and milk. It's interesting to see Eddie Anderson, a few years away from achieving comic fame as Rochester on "The Jack Benny Program," as Carey's non-stereotypical valet, and Neil Hamilton, later Commissioner Gordon on the 1960s TV series version of "Batman," as a romantic lead.

Bennett is fine, but the real person to watch in "What Price Hollywood?" is Sherman. He handles this role with an easy grace, probably because in real life, he was a director as well as an actor (after this film he would direct Mae West in "She Done Him Wrong," followed by Katharine Hepburn in her Oscar-winning role as the star of "Morning Glory.") He would die shortly thereafter, in 1934. 


Here is a listing of full cast and credits.