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.

 

"Ladies of Leisure," or Easel to Love

Barbara Stanwyck enters the 1930 film "Ladies of Leisure" -- and film history -- in a rowboat. The oars squeak. Her face is marked by mascara-streaked tears and she's clutching a broken dress strap. She's Kay, a party girl who just left a wild one on a yacht.

On shore is Ralph Graves as Jerry, who's also left a wild party, this one at his Manhattan penthouse. He's gone for a drive, but now he's fixing the flat tire on his Lincoln. Stanwyck climbs on shore, shivering.

Kay: How far is it to town?

Jerry: What town?

Kay: There's only one town.

So Jerry gives her a ride back to Manhattan, where the night is obliterated by blinking neon signs selling Squibb's Dental Creme and Aeolian Player Piano Rolls -- but where Kay will eventually learn to see beyond them to the stars.  

"Ladies of Leisure" isn't Stanwyck's first film, but it's the one that made her a star. It also marked the beginning of a five-picture collaboration with director Frank Capra (seen with Stanwyck at right) -- one that almost didn't happen. Capra wasn't impressed with Stanwyck at their first meeting, and she left upset. It wasn't until Capra was bawled out by Stanwyck's husband, comic Frank Fay, who urged Capra to watch an older Stanwyck screen test, that she was cast in the role.

Now back to the plot -- Jerry's an artist who's anything but starving. He lives high thanks to his family wealth -- dad runs a couple of railroads. On the ride back, Kay dozes off:



While she's asleep, Jerry sees something in Kay's face -- something that leads him to use her as a model for his new painting, "Hope."

"She had a mask on, like everybody else," Jerry tells his mother, "but underneath I think she had this."

The tricky part is getting down to it, and their first rocky sessions together show a bit of improvisation on Stanwyck's part:



 Jerry knows that if Kay can get past her streetwise exterior, Hope will come through. But she's a tough nut to crack.   

Jerry: It's like a man I knew once. He was suspicious, bitter, harsh, cruel. Those things were written in hs face like a map of his life. He died -- I saw him laid out. His face was a new face -- it was fine, noble. There was peace in it. He was himself again. Do you see what I mean?

Kay: No. All I get out of it is you gotta die to find yourself. Not me -- not for two dollars an hour.

Also hanging around is Jerry's upper crust fiancee (Juliette Compton). She's cool and controlling -- we know she isn't right for our hero because she calls him "Jeddy." Marie Prevost is around for comic relief as Kay's roommate and best friend. And then there's Jerry's boozy friend Bill Standish, played by the ever-welcome Lowell Sherman. He and Stanwyck are perfectly matched in the wisecrack department:

Kay (seeing Bill enter): Drunk again!

Bill: Congratulations, so am I.

Of course, Jerry eventually gets through to Kay and she lets down her defenses and becomes a perfect model. They also fall in love, in a scene that echoes the moment in Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life" when George Bailey (James Stewart) realizes in a mixture of anger and awe that he loves Mary Hatch (Donna Reed):



 The Jerry-Kay relationship upsets Jerry's wealthy parents, and there's a father-son standoff. Jerry's mother (Nance O'Neil) visits Kay and tries to get her to break up with Jerry for his own sake, and in return mom gets the full Stanwyck:



Capra writes in his autobiography that, if she was filming an emotional scene, Stanwyck left everything on the field in the first take. And in this performance, so early in her career, she already has the ability to combine outer toughness with a sudden inner vulnerability that can tear your heart out. Sherman and Prevost perform like the pros they are. Graves, who was already a star thanks to his roles in the Capra-directed action pictures "Flight" and "Submarine," has a tough time impersonating someone with artistic temperament.

Here are the complete credits for "Ladies of Leisure."

The Mae Clarke Film Festival: "The Good Bad Girl" and "The Final Edition"

"Don't tell anyone, but
my real name is Mary Klotz."

Of all the actresses who appeared in 1930s movies, Mae Clarke (1910-1992) was certainly one of them.

She played a variety of roles, including rather wooden reporter, rather wooden gangster's moll, rather wooden movie star, rather wooden bride carried away by Frankenstein and rather wooden prostitute. And she will go down in film history for this scene:

Clarke's kisser was a pretty one, and deserved -- and got -- better than a grapefruit half in most of her movies. She had the good fortune to appear in several true film classics, including "The Public Enemy," "Frankenstein," the first version of "Waterloo Bridge" and the original version of "The Front Page." She was capable of convincing work, but in average movies headed by average directors she tends to deliver her lines as if she was thinking about something else.

In the 1931 film "The Good Bad Girl" she gets to dip her toe into soap opera -- a territory dominated at the time by the likes of Kay Francis and Norma Shearer. She is Marcia, a reluctant gangster's moll. As the movie opens, she is trying to leave the big lug, but as Neil Sedaka so memorably said, breaking up is hard to do. Or, as the gangster (Robert Ellis) says, "There's only one way for either of us -- feet first," which does not have much of a danceable beat. Then the gangster leaves to settle a score with an old rival, which he does in kind of a memorable way:

The gangster wants Marcia to give him a fake alibi, but she refuses. She has fallen in love with another man (James Hall). The gangster is imprisoned and swears vengeance, and Marcia marries the other man even though he doesn't know about her past. When he and his high-society family find out, she is shunned, even though she's with child. Marcia has the baby, and the gangster escapes from prison, intent on tracking down and killing her. He makes it as far as the baby's nursery, where the police shoot him down like a dog. At the same time, rich husband has come to his senses and sets out to reconcile with Marcia.

"The Good Bad Girl" gives Clarke several opportunities to do some heavy-duty emoting, and she is convincing as the young mother set adrift. As Marcia's boozy pal, silent-film beauty Marie Prevost is aces with comedy relief, and things chug along until the inevitable happy ending:

In 1932's "The Final Edition," Clarke is reporter Ann Woodman, and the first part of her last name describes her performance. When she acts sassy or makes with a wisecrack, it's almost as if she doesn't understand it's a joke. Someone like Glenda Farrell would be knocking these lines out of the park, you get me?

Anyway, Ann wants to be a reporter but boyfriend Bradshaw (Pat O'Brien), who's also the city editor, doesn't think she's up to the job. Ann gets her chance when the new police commissioner is murdered and she jumps in to console the man's wife:

She scoops the competition with details about the murder and then she follows the killer to a resort hotel where he's hiding out. The bad guys catch on and she and Bradshaw end up in hot water, at least temporarily:

The newspaper picture was a stock-in-trade at Warner Bros., where O'Brien was under contract, so he fits right in, talking a mile a minute. For instance, try to decipher what he's saying here:

As for Clarke, her career continued into the 1960s, but with smaller and smaller roles. Her other credits include "Singin' in the Rain" (as a hairdresser), "The Catered Affair" (as a saleswoman) and "Pat and Mike" (as a golfer). 

Here are full credits for "The Good Bad Girl" and "The Final Edition."