Background: "The Squall"

The 1929 film "The Squall" is a notoriously bad early talkie with an over-the-top performance by Myrna Loy that I skewered in this post. If you're interested, here's a little background on the movie.

The arrival of "The Squall" in the nation’s theatres during the summer of 1929 provoked this response from moviegoers and critics alike:

You’re kidding, right?

“Two different audiences on viewing ‘The Squall’ laughed long and loud at its sexiest moments,” reported Motion Picture News. “This is one that you will want to keep away from your juvenile patronage. It is strong meat for most adults, who can take it either seriously or laughingly as they see fit.”

“The best that can be said for this production,” added Mordaunt Hall in The New York Times, “is that the atmospheric effects are sometimes very good. The dialogue and the acting, however, are so pathetic that they discount any minor virtues this offering may possess, for even the discussions concerning love and the hardy embracing are open to ridicule.”

“You remember that this was a fairly good stage play. You’re sure that the film version is pretty bad,” added Photoplay. “Something happened between the story conference and the cutting room. Myrna Loy is the stereotyped Nubi, the gypsy girl and the hot baby who disrupts homes, while Alice Joyce is the Hungarian mother and Carroll Nye is the son. This film just doesn’t click, that’s all. And it’s unconsciously funny.”

Based on a 1926 play that ran a year on Broadway, "The Squall," viewed through contemporary eyes, is melodramatic high camp that brings to mind the “Bad Playhouse” sketches from the early days of “Saturday Night Live.” It’s full to bursting with awkward dialogue, obvious plotting and performances that range from immobile to oblivious.

To state the plot, we turn to an advertisement for the film that ran in Variety:

Nubi – gypsy gale of passion! An ill wind that blows no man good when, whirlwind-wild, she rages untamed through peaceful lives … Born of the storm, this half-clad human hurricane takes love where she will – from old, from young; from father, from son. Cyclonic in her caresses … Venomous, voluptuous, super-vampire … The fury of her passion lays waste the souls of men!

Any questions?

Myrna Loy is Nubi, a Hungarian hottie with blazing eyes and razor-sharp cheekbones. She is a gypsy who has been catapulted from the caravan for her wanton ways. She seeks refuge at the peaceful, prosperous farm of the Lajos family because she is on the run from the gypsy leader. “He keel me,” she purrs.

The Lajos family is compassionate, and they give Nubi food and a place to live even as a storm brews outside and they speak dialogue that foreshadows trouble like crazy. Take this exchange, between the young Irma (Loretta Young, also receiving the worst notices of her career) and Grandfather Lajos (Knute Erickson):

Irma: Oh, I just hate squalls. They only make everyone so unhappy. I'd like someone to tell me why we have them.

Grandfather: Perhaps there's a reason, Irma. God gives us shadows that we may know light. He gives us sorrow that we may know joy. And perhaps he sends the squall that we may learn the beauty of a limpid sky.

Before you can say “the Gabor sisters,” Nubi is trying to seduce every guy in the joint – son Paul (Carroll Nye), farm hand Peter (Henry Cording) and father Josef (Richard Tucker, at left). (“I am keesing your shadow,” Nubi tells Josef.)

Longtime wife Maria (Alice Joyce) is watching from the shadows. What's a wife to do? "My husband -- half of my life," she says. "My son -- the other half." It falls to Maria to get rid of Nubi, courtesy of a convenient return of the caravan. The Lajos family can return to a life of prosperous complacency, thanks to the family matriarch.

Nubi is one of Loy’s most notorious turns as an exotic temptress – similar, if less melodramatic, characterizations would follow in films such as “Thirteen Women” and “The Mask of Fu Manchu."

"They built me up as someone with a knife in her teeth," she recalled in a 1987 interview.

Although ad copy for “The Squall” billed her as a “sensational overnight star,” the reality was the Loy’s career dated to 1926, and she had appeared two years earlier in the first talkie, “The Jazz Singer.”

Fortunately, Loy’s career would survive her turn as the nubile Nubi – it would be another few years, and several more ethnic villainess roles, before Loy would be cast as Nora Charles in “The Thin Man” and begin a career as one of Hollywood’s most endearing leading ladies. And despite a review in Variety that characterized her voice as being “identical with commencement exercises in a grammar school,” Loretta Young also went on to have a long, successful career.

Others in the cast weren’t as fortunate.

After a twenty-year career in silent films, Alice Joyce’s speaking style was condemned by several critics and she only made a few more films. After playing the father, Richard Tucker, despite being a founding member of the Screen Actors Guild, went on to a sporadic career in B movies.

Loy’s spicy performance as Nubi ensured that “The Squall” would run into censor trouble – in Chicago, in particular, the movie was heavily edited. But shrewd theatre operators turned this to their advantage. Said one in Motion Picture News: “In prominent place in ad feature: ‘This picture is adult entertainment. Children will not enjoy or understand it,’ and you’ll have everyone coming from high school age and over.”

Sources:

Motion Picture News, May 18, 1929, p. 1717

Motion Picture News, June 8, 1929, p. 1963

The New York Times, May 10, 1929

The New York Times, Myrna Loy Receives a Tribute, November 7, 1987

Photoplay, July 1929, p. 56

Variety, May 8, 1929, p. 12

Variety, May 15, 1929, p. 20

Variety, May 15, 1929, p. 30

Variety, June 26, 1929, p. 9

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.

The Dorothy Burgess Film Festival: "Playgirl" and "From Headquarters"

Of all the actors and actresses who appeared in 1930s films, Dorothy Burgess (1907-61) was certainly one of them.


Here she is in the 1932 film "Play-Girl," opposite Winnie Lightner.











And who could forget her in "Hold Your Man," with Clark Gable and Jean Harlow?

Or "From Headquarters," with Kenneth Thomson?

And "Ladies They Talk About," with Barbara Stanwyck.

"Put up your dukes! I mean your duchesses!"

So, as you can see, the traditional Burgess role was the woman who was always picking herself up off the floor.

She was the troublemaker, the spiteful gossip, the jealous other woman. If you happen to be watching an old movie where one of the characters is always standing around with her hands on her hips, giving the stinkeye to the heroine, it's probably Burgess.

The niece of actress Fay Bainter, Burgess was born into a well-to-do Los Angeles family (dad was the first president of Western Airlines) and after a stint in a tony boarding school she made her Broadway debut while still a teenager in a play that starred Aunt Fay.

Like Myrna Loy, Burgess found fame in fiery temptress roles -- she played a gypsy girl in "The Squall" (a role Loy played in the film version) and an African-American woman in "Lulu Belle." She played a Mexican girl in her film debut, 1928's "In Old Arizona."

In late 1931, Burgess signed a contract with Warner Bros.-First National and began playing a string of mean girls.

In the 1932 film "Play-Girl," for instance, she is Edna, the bitter, negative counterpart to our heroine Buster, played by Loretta Young. Buster and Edna are sales clerks at the Mayfield Department Store, along with Buster's bosom buddy, Georgine (Winnie Lightner). Edna is a mean girl, always snidely criticizing the others:



Buster is swept off her feet by the brash Wallie, played by the hardly-ever-charming Norman Foster. They get married, and Buster thinks Wallie is a successful businessman who's always closing on big deals. Then he makes a confession -- the "deals" he's out making involve playing cards and poker chips! Then Buster makes a confession -- she's pregnant! They argue, and Wallie takes a powder. Buster is forced to return to the department store, and Edna is waiting to pounce:



In the 1933 films "Hold Your Man" and "Ladies They Talk About," Burgess crossed paths with Jean Harlow and Barbara Stanwyck, respectively. In "Hold Your Man" Burgess plays Gypsy, the old flame of Eddie (Clark Gable), who's now hooked up with Ruby (Harlow). In "Ladies They Talk About," Burgess is Susie, a religious fanatic and bonafide nutcase who has eyes for political reformer Dave Slade (Preston Foster). Unfortunately, Slade is all about Nan (Barbara Stanwyck), a convict in the same cell block as Susie, which leads to Burgess picking herself up off the floor.

In the 1933 crime drama "From Headquarters," Burgess is Dolly, the drug-addicted former girlfriend of a millionaire who's been murdered. At first she is a suspect, but under questioning her mental foundation shows signs of cracking like dried oatmeal:



By late 1933, Burgess's career began to sputter. She was in the headlines due to her involvement in an auto accident where a young woman was killed, and in July she was injured while filming -- of course -- a fight scene at Universal Studios. She appeared in only a handful of films after that, concluding with 1943's "The West Side Kid."

Here is a complete filmography.
  

The Purnell Pratt Film Festival: "Road to Paradise" and "Paid"

Purnell Pratt, Pickle Puss

Of all the actors and actresses who appeared in 1930s films, Purnell Pratt (It sounds like dancing!) was certainly one of them.

Pratt (1885-1941) began on Broadway around the turn of the century, and appeared in two George M. Cohan plays -- "Seven Keys to Baldpate" and "Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford" -- before going west in the late 1920s.

He was a character actor, a fellow with thinning hair, a tight mouth, a tiny mustache, a sharp voice and a no-nonsense manner, which meant he played a lot of (corrupt and otherwise) authority figures -- attorneys, judges, politicians, cops, physicians. He played James Cagney's father in "The Public Enemy" and the newspaper publisher who urges action against gangsters in "Scarface." He played District Attorney Markham in several Philo Vance movies, and in his best-known role, he ... well, OK, so he didn't have a best-known role.

In the 1931 film "The Public Defender" he is John Kirk, a corrupt bigshot who has framed a hapless bank treasurer. Unluckily for him, the bank treasurer's daughter (song title: "She Was Only the Treasurer's Daughter, But She Had Impressive Assets") is the main squeeze of Pike Winslow, aka the Public Defender, aka Richard Dix, aka Ernst Carlton Brimmer! The movie's big confrontation comes when Winslow and the cops visit Kirk's home, and everything explodes in Kirk's face:

In the 1930 film "Road to Paradise," Pratt is a cop, Inspector Updike by name, who has been called to a New York City mansion after a robbery attempt. A woman lies wounded -- she is nice rich girl Margaret Waring, played by Loretta Young. Another woman sits anxiously at her bedside -- she is nice poor girl Mary Brennan, also played by Young.

So "Road to Paradise" is like a blending of "To Catch a Thief" and "The Parent Trap." Margaret and Mary are long-separated sisters, and their backgrounds are very different. Margaret adores a minuet, the Ballet Russe and Crepes Suzette, while Mary loves to rock and roll, a hot dog makes her lose control, what a wild duet!

Mary has only just found out about her lookalike -- it happened at a Chinese restaurant, through the miracle of rear projection.











When two of Mary's shady friends learn of the resemblance, they decide to rob the Waring mansion, with Mary as a reluctant participant.

Mary enters the mansion first, and gets caught by the butler, who assumes that Mary is Margaret:



Mary is a bit unsteady, but through some quick thinking she is able to fool the butler, a suspicious cop on the beat, Margaret's French-speaking maid and Margaret's beau, George (Jack Mulhall), who nonetheless is convinced that there's something about Mary.

George leaves, and the real Margaret enters, catching the gang in the act. She is shot (only a flesh wound) and Mary is too guilt-stricken to leave. So she stays, continuing to pose as Margaret while the real Margaret lies unconscious.

Enter Pratt, as Inspector Updike. He's sure that the resemblance of the two women is more than just a coincidence:



Updike tries to back Mary into a corner, psychologically speaking, but she manages to keep wiggling out. Oh, and there's one other wrinkle to the story -- Mary can read minds by holding the subject's hand and holding onto a medallion she's had her whole life that reads, "Each to each/is spirit mate/when in danger/trust to fate." Mary uses this skill to read her sister's mind and find the answers to Updike's probing questions. But that doesn't stop Updike:



"Road to Paradise" ends with the sisters reconciled, with the real crooks captured, and with Margaret willingly giving George to Mary, because she really never loved him anyway.

In "Paid," also released in 1930, Pratt is a much meaner character. He's arrogant department store owner Edward Gilder, who is in court as former clerk Mary Turner (Joan Crawford) is sentenced for theft. Mary is innocent -- the stuff was planted on her -- and she gives a very dramatic Joan Crawford-ish statement in court, but Gilder gives not a hoot:



Mary is sent to the big house, where she lives in squalor and even has to take showers with negroes. After three years she returns to honest society, but honest society doesn't seem all that happy to see her, so she teams up with old cellmate Aggie (Marie Prevost) and her gang, including Joe (Robert Armstrong).

Mary has spent her time in stir boning up on the law, so she and her gang start a racket that raises money through (technically) legal means. One of their plans includes the quaint old phrase "heart balm," a relic from the days when rich men wrote letters of love to poor women, who used them in court to get restitution for their broken hearts. In one of the movie's best scenes, Aggie gets involved, with Mary's guidance, in a heart balm case:



But as successful as she is, Mary has bigger fish to fry -- she sets her sights on Bob Gilder (Kent Douglass), the son of the department store owner who sent her to prison.

So we get to see Pratt again, as he re-encounters Mary:



"Paid" starts to bog down a little when Joe is talked into a robbery at Gilder's house, which is really a trap to catch Mary and her gang. There's a murder, and nobody knows who did it, but Joe takes the fall, even though it means life imprisonment, to ensure Mary's happiness. This allows Crawford to act all over the place (what I like to think of as The MGM Effect), and she and young Gilder live happily ever after.

As for Pratt, he would go on griping at people in the movies until "Pot of Gold," released in 1941.

 

The Louise Fazenda Film Festival: "Loose Ankles" and "Wide Open"

Of all of the actors and actresses who appeared in 1930s films, Louise Fazenda (1895-1962) was certainly one of them -- and certainly the only one of them who has a tangential connection to "Reservoir Dogs," of all things.

We'll get to that connection in a few paragraphs.

First, here's a little information about Louise Fazenda's early years, in a section I like to call "A Little Information About Louise Fazenda's Early Years."


Born in Lafayette, Indiana, Fazenda moved to Los Angeles with her parents as a child. In 1913 she made her movie debut in short comedies, and by 1915 she was playing opposite the likes of Fatty Arbuckle at Keystone.

In 1919 Fazenda was voted
"Most Likely to Hit Ben Turpin
on the Head with a Chicken"

Louise Fazenda and Fatty Arbuckle in 1916's
"The Unfortunate Flatulence Incident"

Unlike other Keystone actresses such as Marie Prevost and Carole Lombard, Fazenda was never one of the studio's Bathing Beauties. Her specialty was more along the lines of straight-laced spinsters or gawky country girls.

Fazenda left Keystone in a salary dispute with Mack Sennett in the early 1920s and spent a year or so in vaudeville. Then she returned to movie making at Warner Bros., where she stayed until retiring from the screen in the late 1930s.

In 1929, Fazenda was one of about, oh, eight million contract players appearing in Warner's talkie extravaganza, "The Show of Shows." Free of a spinster or hillbilly costume for once, she wears an evening gown and does a comic number with Beatrice Lillie, Frank Fay and Lloyd Hamilton that includes the slicing and dicing of four different poems into one naughty-sounding one. Here it is:



(Click here for the second part of this number, where the quartet lampoons the song "Your Mother and Mine.")  

In two 1930 films, "Loose Ankles" and "Wide Open," Fazenda does something kind of sneaky -- she steals the show, or at least provides some lively moments, with her spinster characterizations.










Like a lot of early talkies, "Loose Ankles" is ten minutes of plot played out over 65 minutes of celluloid. It opens with Loretta Young getting some attentive tootsie time ...



... from her elderly butler? Kinky.

But such is life for Loretta, a carefree example of flaming, or at least smoldering, youth. How carefree? Well, she has just inherited a million dollars, but care? She is free of it. The will stipulates that to get the money she must remain untainted by scandal, but instead Loretta puts an ad in the newspaper specifically seeking taint.

Meanwhile, over at the Gigolo Arms Apartments, fledgling fancy man Douglas Fairbanks Jr. is pressed into service to answer the ad. He meets Young, and they go through flirtatiousness that involves him losing his clothing:



(Seeing Fairbanks in that dressing gown calls to mind Cary Grant in "Bringing Up Baby.")

But enough about plot! You should be able to figure out that Young and Fairbanks get together toot suite and scandal-free. Most of the rest of the movie takes place at a nightclub, where Young's tight, um, fisted aunts (one of them played by Fazenda) have gone to keep track of their niece and end up with two of Fairbanks's gigolo bros. The aunts are served strong drink, and Fazenda starts doing her stuff, with the help of Eddie Nugent:



Next we move to "Wide Open," a film that proves positively that you should never, ever give Edward Everett Horton a romantic lead. In supporting roles with the likes of Fred Astaire, or under the direction of Ernst Lubtisch, Horton could be a delight. But when he's the befuddled hero at the center of the story, well, that's a lot of stammering.


Horton plays Simon, a meek bookkeeper who works at a phonograph company. Fazenda plays Agatha, a fellow employee who loves Simon from afar. At one point, she corners Simon in a recording studio. He accidentally flips the "on" switch, and their conversation is captured on vinyl, only to pop up embarrassingly when the boss is trying to impress a client:



But the real plot of "Wide Open" is that Simon shelters a young woman (Patsy Ruth Miller) who gives him a sob story about being homeless. Somehow word gets around that they've gotten married, and the employees throw a party for the newlyweds at Simon's house. Agatha attends, and sings the blues:



The plot is wrapped up when it is revealed that Simon's young woman visitor is actually the plant owner's daughter, and with Simon's help she uncovers financial foolery at the phonograph factory. The boss rewards Simon, he marries the daughter, and Fazenda does a fast fade.

In real life, Fazenda married producer Hal B. Wallis in 1927, leading to jokes that he was "The Prisoner of Fazenda," haw haw. She made her final film, "The Old Maid," in 1939, and spent the rest of her days collecting art and performing philanthropic acts. As part of her work in a prison outreach program she befriended Edward Bunker, a convicted felon with a long record, and encouraged him to write. Bunker wrote a book, "No Beast So Fierce," and ended up co-adapting it into the 1978 Dustin Hoffman film "Straight Time." Bunker collaborated on a few other screenplays and ended up playing small roles in several movies, including "Reservoir Dogs," in which he was Mr. Blue.

Fazenda wasn't around to witness any of this -- she died in 1962 at age 66.

Here are full credits for "Loose Ankles," and for "Wide Open."

Loretta Young Glass Ceiling Theatre: "Big Business Girl" and "Weekend Marriage"

Although she took a turn or two at playing bad girls -- or at least morally ambivalent girls -- early in her career, Loretta Young always seemed more comfortable in good girl roles, especially the good girl who excels in the workplace while attracting the (usually dishonorable) attentions of the boss.  That's certainly the case in 1933's "Employees Entrance," where she is a sales clerk coveted by hard-driving Warren William in full douchebag mode, and in "She Had to Say Yes," released the same year, where she played a department store secretary forced to date visiting buyers.

But in at least two other movies from the same period -- 1931's "Big Business Girl" and 1932's "Weekend Marriage" -- Young plays businesswomen who rise into the executive ranks and then realize that the love of a "good" man is more important.

"Big Business Girl" begins on graduation night at Nice White Peoples' College, where Claire "Mac" MacIntyre (Young) and boyfriend Johnny (Frank Albertson) are celebrating at the local country club. Johnny is a band leader, and the group is booked on a European tour. Mac is heading for New York City, to look for a job to pay her student debt.

The only problem is, Johnny's a bit of an, um, how shall we say it? Yes, lazy imbecile. He's ready to ditch the tour and go hang out in New York with Mac.

Johnny: Why should people have to work when there are so many wonderful ways to waste time?

Mac: You're only good for two things -- making music and making love.

(We'll take your word on that last one, Mac -- please don't show us.)

Johnny finally hauls ass to Europe, and Mac hauls -- er, goes to New York. In seeking a job, she tromps the streets for weeks, or, in 1930s movie time, about five minutes. She ends up applying for a job at an ad agency run by Robert Clayton (Ricardo Cortez). And she gets it, because everyone else is gone (it's Saturday afternoon), and Clayton likes the way she takes dictation. And her legs.

Anyway, the agency has just landed a new automobile account, and Mac turns out to be very clever at writing ad copy aimed at women. She gets her own office and she's making over a hundred smackers a week:



Clayton immediately starts putting the moves on Mac, and she goodnaturedly tells him no about three thousand times.

Then, suddenly, Johnny is back in town. Mac catches a glimpse of him in her mirror while she's getting ready to go to a party at Clayton's. Maybe the mirror shot symbolizes her dual role -- as Johnny's mate and as a businesswoman. Or maybe the director just thought it was the easiest way to show that Johnny was back.

Johnny is back because he's walked away from a long-term engagement in Paris, but he's all smiles. "I don't think it's a bit funny to fail in one thing after another," Mac says, and you realize that "Big Business Girl" has done a piss-poor job of showing us just what she sees in Johnny. He pouts -- which pretty much sums up his performance for the rest of the movie -- while Mac goes to Clayton's party, and afterwards, when Clayton escorts Mac home, there's a bit of a scene, because we find out that Mac and Johnny have been secretly married all this time:



Mac ends up getting Johnny and his band a job on a radio program sponsored by the auto company, but he doesn't know she's behind it. So he's just as pouty as ever, and he's started hanging around a wealthy matron as we hear "Just a Gigolo" on the soundtrack:



We're kind of glad to see Clayton slug Johnny, but the truth is that neither guy is worth rooting for. Clayton talks Mac into getting a quickie divorce, and a hotel room tete-a-tete is set up with Joan Blondell as the woman in the case, so that Johnny can be "caught" in the act and Mac can have grounds for the split. But Mac changes her mind, Clayton is foiled, and at the end of "Big Business Girl" Mac and Johnny are together. Hooray?

But you ain't seen nothin' yet.

"Big Business Girl" is practically "The Feminine Mystique" compared to "Weekend Marriage."

This one begins with a nice plug for the studio:

In line to see the stupendous Warner Bros. film "Blessed Event," greatest picture of all time, about a Walter Winchell-type columnist played by Lee Tracy, seating at popular prices, showings around the clock, are Lola (Young) and Ken (Norman Foster), just two lovestruck kids who work in New York City. Lola wants to middle-aisle it with Ken, as Winchell used to put it, but he wants to wait until he has a better job, because, not to put too fine a point on it, working women are slovenly harlots who should be at home (choose a verb) washing, cooking, changing (choose a noun) clothes, meals, babies.

Ken gets a promotion and a chance to go to South America, but Lola wants him to stay. She gets help from her sister-in-law Agnes (Aline MacMahon), who's kept her job even though she's married to Lola's brother Jim (Roscoe Karns). Agnes instructs Lola on how to play Ken and get him to propose instead of leaving for Argentina. She writes instructions for Lola in the secretary's underground language -- shorthand -- so that Ken can't read it. And sure enough, they end up married. And Ken lets Lola keep her job -- for now.

There are two couples that are a kind of counterpoint to Lola and Ken in "Weekend Marriage." One is Agnes and Jim, another two-paycheck marriage. One of the best scenes in the movie takes place at a band concert, where Jim complains about having a wife who works outside the home:



The other couple involves Lola's friend Connie (Sheila Terry), another secretary. Her bullying brother (J. Carrol Naish) is forcing her to marry an ugly little bootlegger because "wimmin belong inna home." In the movie's most troubling scene, Lola goes home with Connie to lend her moral support in standing up to her brother. But the brother slaps Connie down -- literally and figuratively -- as Lola flinches.

So, the movie seems to be telling us, Lola could have it a lot worse. That's comforting.

Then Ken gets a cut in pay just as Lola gets a raise and a promotion, and the strains in the marriage start to show. So when Lola goes to help Connie, Ken gets mad. He goes out and gets plastered, and Lola has to bail him out of the drunk tank:



Lola is then given a choice by her boss -- move with him to St. Louis as his assistant, or lose her job in New York. Ken refuses to move anywhere just because his wife has a new job, and they split up. For the next five minutes of the movie, Lola is furiously courted by one of her firm's partners (George Brent). But when she gets word that Ken is sick back in New York, she drops Brent and returns home.

And this is where it's time for Lola to get smacked down, but good.

Ken has pneumonia, and he's being cared for by his common-law wife -- his companion in the drunk tank. Lola enters, but the doctor won't let her see him -- it'll be too upsetting, and Ken is on the verge of death. Lola protests, and the doctor unloads on her as Lola's mom nods sagely:




Doctor: Let me give you a little advice. One way or another, a man will find a woman to look out for him not only when he's sick but when he's well. That's something you so-called "modern girls" never seem to count on. You talk about freedom, because you think it's something men have and cherish. But they don't. They hate it. They get along best when they're not free. It's human nature, that's all. They need old-fashioned women looking after their health, nagging them into caution, feeding them properly, and giving them families to live for. A great many of these women are just as well-fitted for business as you are, but they don't want it. They put their talents to work instead in what people today think of as a narrow sphere. Well, I don't think it's narrow. I think it's the most important sphere of all. Not much recognition in it, perhaps -- no spectacular publicity -- but it's built up nations before now, and it will build them again.

Mother: You hear that, Lola?

To add insult to injury, the doctor is played by Grant Mitchell, who excelled at playing principled types, including a Franklin Roosevelt-like workers' camp director in "The Grapes of Wrath" who offers the Joad family a few fleeting moments of happiness on their journey to California.

Then Agnes enters. Her insistence on having a job has caused she and Jim to split up.

Agnes: Give up anything. It doesn't matter. The man you love is worth all the jobs in the world.

Well.

There's just one thing to do. Lola reunites with Ken, who has rallied, and she puts on an apron.

Ken: What are you going to do?

Lola: Be a wife.

Here are the complete credits for "Big Business Girl" and "Weekend Marriage", and the trailer for "Big Business Girl":



And the trailer for "Weekend Marriage":

Awkward Early Talkie Theatre: "The Show of Shows"

Like most people who love old movies, I can't watch them without thinking about what was going on in the world at the time. And to me, "The Show of Shows," released in 1929, is more than a movie. It's actually more like a stage revue, and its variety of acts makes it a kind of time capsule of pre-depression America, a portrait of life at a studio that was feeling its oats just before hard times hit.

By 1929 silent pictures were as dead as Valentino and talkies were the new standard across America, so the major studios were poaching performers from the Broadway stage and vaudeville who could sing, dance and enunciate dialogue in clear, honeyed tones. Naturally the studios wanted to showcase these new stars, so there was a rash of revues heavy on comedy and music -- "Paramount on Parade," "Fox Movietone Follies of 1929" and MGM's "Hollywood Revue of 1929."

At Warner Bros., a studio that was first in the talkie sweepstakes, they spared no kale. "The Show of Shows" would be mostly in Technicolor, and cost an estimated $850,000. (In prints available today, only one Technicolor number survives.) Contract players by the dozens were trotted out, from Lupino Lane to Myrna Loy to Rin Tin Tin -- only Al Jolson, arguably the biggest star on the lot at that time, was exempted. Some performers headlined numbers, others introduced them, and still others popped up in bit roles.

Funny thing is, the headline performers who get the most screen time here -- people like Irene Bordoni, Ted Lewis, Lloyd Hamilton and Winnie Lightner -- would largely be gone in a few years, while the actors in smaller roles, like Loretta Young, Myrna Loy, Chester Morris and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., would emerge as stars over the long haul.

"The Show of Shows" opens with a weird little scene set during the French Revolution, where a titled nobleman loses his noggin to the guillotine, leading a peasant to proclaim: "Prologue is dead! On with 'The Show of Shows'!" Haha, what? Like the silent film was a titled nobleman, but now he's decapitated and the peasants of talkieland have taken over? More likely it was a farewell to live musical numbers -- the prologues that often preceded silent movies -- but it's still weird.

Anyway, here's our emcee, Frank Fay. I've written about Fay before -- his career and performance style are very interesting to me. He may not have made it in movies, but he was a hit in vaudeville, and his droll delivery of a monologue ended up influencing people like Jack Benny. Here's Fay at the beginning of the film -- he enters at the conclusion of a number by the Pasadena American Legion marching band:

The acts in "The Show of Shows" go from marching bands to Shakespeare, including a pirate number (?) featuring bandleader Ted Lewis, the self-billed "high-hatted tragedian of song," who looks like he's shot through gauze. And there are production
numbers where we glimpse the likes of a coy Myrna Loy (she's actually in a couple of them, including the only surviving Technicolor number) and a young Loretta Young.

Then we come to a number with Fay, Beatrice Lillie, Louise Fazenda and Lloyd Hamilton. They recite poetry that gets sliced and diced into a spicy limerick, and then they do something that happens a couple of times in this movie -- they parody MGM's rival effort, "Hollywood Revue of 1929." In MGM's revue, Charles King sings the tearjerking "Your Mother and Mine," and in "The Show of Shows" this quartet parodies it in a pretty funny way:



Another parody comes at the end of the "Singing in the Bathtub" number, performed by Winnie Lightner in a Busby Berkeley-like setting of old fat men in striped bathing suits. At the climax, Lightner then joins wrestler Bull Montana in "You Were Meant for Me," another parody of a "Hollywood Revue" number:



Then Frank Fay is joined by comic Sid Silvers, who imitates the man who isn't there -- Al Jolson:



And there is cult-cha, even: John Barrymore as Richard III, in a striking performance -- a soliloquy from Shakespeare's "Henry VI":

Finally, all the stars who have appeared in the film stick their heads through cutouts of stars and sing the final number, "Lady Luck." Even Barrymore.

There's an interesting allusion to economic hard times in the movie when Fay jokes about a play where the cast is dressed in rags -- "It was a futuristic piece" -- but the full effect of the Great Depression on America, including Hollywood, was still a few months away. "The Show of Shows" is the party before the hangover.

Here are the complete credits for "The Show of Shows."

The Henry Kolker Film Festival: "I Like Your Nerve" and "The Crash"

"I wonder what she meant by that?"

Of all the actors and actresses who appeared in 1930s films, Henry Kolker (1870-1947) was certainly one of them.

He had a long stage career and directed several silent films, including a 1921 production of "Disraeli" with George Arliss, who repeated the role in an early sound film. In talkies, Kolker most often played older, pasty white men of power and/or wealth, often with younger wives and/or girlfriends who run rings around them -- the kind of guy who says, "Something wrong, my dear?" a lot because he doesn't know that his significant other is making whoopie with another guy.

In the course of a very prolific career -- including a mind-boggling 28 films in 1934 -- Kolker played judges, doctors and attorneys. He played the president of the bank that Barbara Stanwyck sleeps her way to the top of in "Baby Face," and he was the stodgy father of Katharine Hepburn in the 1938 film "Holiday." He also played the cuckolded husband of Kay Francis not once, but twice -- in the 1933 film "The Keyhole" and in the 1932 film "Jewel Robbery." In this scene from "Jewel Robbery," Kolker is the guy in the straw hat who watches impotently as William Powell slickly robs a jewelry store and enthralls Kay Francis in the process:

In the 1932 film "The Crash," Kolker plays a character who's more in control. He is John Fair, a successful Wall Street trader who kicks off the movie by calling it quits with his selfish mistress, Linda Gault (Ruth Chatterton):



But Linda's husband, Geoffrey (George Brent), is taking a beating on Wall Street. And he knows that Linda and John have had an af-Fair (Get it?) so he tries to blackmail Fair with Linda's letters, which receives a chilly response:

In the odd little 1931 film "I Like Your Nerve," Kolker slicks his hair with what looks like black shoe polish and adds Rudolph Valentino-style sideburns as Areal Pacheco, the minister of fiance in the small Central American country of Sao Pedro. Pacheco has embezzled funds, but to repay the debt he has engineered a marriage between his stepdaughter Diane (Loretta Young) and a piggish, priggish Englishman Clive Latimer (Edmund Breon) who happens to be very rich.

Diane has reconciled herself to the loveless match, but then she meets brash American Larry O'Brien (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.), who sweeps her off her feet by giving her a ride home -- after spreading broken glass across the road where her limousine will travel and causing four punctured tires. Pacheco regards the American coolly:



O'Brien's devotion to Diane includes engineering a kidnapping so that Latimer will pay a ransom, which O'Brien then passes on to Pacheco, thus earning the affection of his future stepfather in law:



Kolker stayed active in movies right up to his death at age 77 -- his last film was 1947's "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty."

Here are complete credits for "I Like Your Nerve," and a trailer:



Here are complete credits for "The Crash," and a trailer: