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.

"Jewel Robbery": A Little Gem

Please forgive me.

I have been raised in a cynical age, so expressions of sincerity don't come easily to me. On the one hand, I am a firm believer in what Lily Tomlin once said: "No matter how cynical you get, it's never enough to keep up." On the other, when I come across something that's genuinely delightful, I have to make it clear that I really, honest to goodness, mean "genuinely delightful."

Which brings us to the 1932 film "Jewel Robbery."

It really IS straight-up delightful -- light comedy and sly satire that's practically on the Lubitsch level, placed there largely through the efforts of William Powell and Kay Francis, who would finish this film and go immediately into Lubitsch's immortal "Trouble in Paradise."

True, "Jewel Robbery" isn't perfect. Lousy title, for one thing -- it's so prosaic, it's like calling "The Thin Man" "Drunk Detective." And there's a plot point involving marijuana that's daring for its time, but that degenerates into dumb visual comedy.

Amazingly, this is a Warner Bros. picture -- from a studio where the "Lower East Side" backlot got much more of a workout than the "European" backlot. We are in Vienna -- real Lubitsch territory -- under the direction of William, nee Wilhelm, Dieterle. Francis is a bored baroness, married to Franz (poor Henry Kolker, almost always in roles where he is very rich and very cuckolded). The highlight of her day is choosing expensive jewelry and letting Franz pay for it. She has just put on her latest purchase, the 28-carat Excelsior Diamond, when a man enters the store:



He is not just any man, of course. He is William Powell as a jewel thief who goes by many identities, so we won't list a name here. We don't need to -- we know and enjoy this man for his identity as William Powell as much as for his portrayal of a jewel thief.

The Baroness is struck by the thoughtful thief -- even while he steals her precious new diamond. "As I watched him go about his work so simply I realized what a high civilization we have in Europe today," she tells a friend (Helen Vinson).

Act two takes place in the baroness's mansion, where she receives another visit from the thief, and act three takes place in the thief's elegant hideaway:



Powell shows Francis his collection of jewels, including one spectacular necklace:

Francis: Oh, they're too heavenly! This necklace--where did you get it?
Powell: At a charity ball.
Francis: What courage!
Powell: No, merely nimble fingers. The lady stood beside me. The Prince of Wales was announced. I could have removed her dress.

All the while, the police are in hot pursuit of our man Powell, but if you think he gets caught then you haven't seen many pre-code movies. He makes his getaway, and the Baroness shows every indication of going with him, without a care or concern about what -- or who -- she's leaving behind. Francis's final gesture to the camera, where she breaks the fourth wall between the actors and the audience, is, well, delightful -- in a totally non-cynical way.

Here's the original trailer:

"I Steal!": The Unflinching "I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang"

Paul Muni begins 1932's "I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang" in an Army uniform and ends it in the uniform of the forgotten man of the depression -- unshaven, battered hat, threadbare coat, wrinkled trousers, probably the slight smell of sweat and cigarettes. He has a wild look in his eyes, as he should -- he's just escaped from a chain gang for a second time and has permitted himself just one final moment with Helen (Helen Vinson), the woman he loves:


From the darkness: "I steal!"

The ending is as abrupt and as unflinching as the rest of "I Am a Fugitive." Eighty years after its release, the film remains a true classic that is carried by the power of its true story, by Muni's performance and by Mervyn LeRoy's swift and sure direction.

The movie begins as James Allen, played by Muni, comes home after World War I. He's greeted by his adoring mother and ineffectual brother, a pompous clergymen whose faith will be absolutely no help to Allen as he faces life's cruelty and challenges.

Walking away from a factory job that will keep him close to home, Allen sets out to work in construction and makes his way across the country. When he is reluctantly involved in a robbery, he is given the harshest sentence possible -- years on a chain gang. (In Georgia, but Warner Bros. didn't want to risk any lawsuits, so that state is unnamed.)

The inhuman conditions Burns faces on the gang leads to his first escape, a terrific piece of kinetic storytelling:


Then it's off to Chicago, where Allen makes a prosperous life as a builder-contractor, until he is undone by the mercenary Marie, played by one of the best of the tough Warner dames, Glenda Farrell. She finds out about Allen's past, courtesy of a letter from the clergyman brother, and blackmails Allen into marriage. When he tries to divorce her to marry Helen, who he really loves, Marie turns stool pigeon. Allen strikes a deal with the authorities -- he'll return to the work camp for a few months, followed by a quiet release.

But after Allen has worked on the chain gang for a year, the state goes back on its word. Watch how Muni plays it, as a man crumbling apart from the inside:


"I Am a Fugitive" has the grittiness we expect from a pre-code Warner film; Allen's safe haven after his escape is in a bawdy house, where he spends the evening with a prostitute (Noel Francis). In another scene, the broke Allen tries to hock the medals he received in the war -- but when he goes to a pawnshop, the broker shows him a box full of medals he's gotten from other veterans. And the beatings and whippings Allen suffers on the gang still seem painfully real.

As a result of the movie, Robert Burns, the real-life James Allen, was pardoned in 1933. And though Muni would go on to deliver award-winning performances, he did little else that matches his vivid portrayal in this film.