"Headline Shooter," or Reel Life

In the 1933 film "Headline Shooter," William Gargan and Frances Dee play news hawks who don't really care who they trample over to get to a story, and that is why they are awesome.

Gargan plays Bill Allen, a photographer for Phototone newsreels, and Dee plays Jane Mallory, a newspaper sob sister. Despite the entreaties of friends, family or even the victims themselves, Bill and Mallory -- everyone calls her by her last name -- are pros to the end, and they belong together like Hildy Johnson and Walter Burns in "His Girl Friday."

We first meet the fast-talking Bill as he's getting ready to photograph a beauty contest that will be judged by the head of the Crocker Cracker company, the honorable Franklin Pangborn. Bill has already shot a photo layout with a certain negligeed contestant in bed, eating Crocker Crackers, and he strongly suggests to President Pangborn that if said contestant wins, then a beauty queen will be endorsing Crocker Crackers.

Benchley's having trouble
with his stem. 

Working next to Hobart Cavanaugh?
Sign me up!

The beauty pageant opens the film and we immediately see a cast of welcome faces -- Pangborn, Robert Benchley as the windbag doing pageant play-by-play on the radio, and Hobart Cavanaugh and Wallace Ford as Bill's fellow newsreel photogs.




Immediately after the beauty pageant, there is an earthquake, because Hollywood. And while he's acting all devil-may-care filming widespread destruction, Bill meets Mallory, and together they go looking for scoops. They share a cigarette or two, and then she has to find a way to get back to the paper:

Bill's always been one to play the field, but he can't get this dame off his mind, get me? And Mallory has to admit she likes him, too, but that's a problem, because fiancee Ralph Bellamy is waiting for her in her Mississippi home town. So Mallory scrams home on vacation, but Bill ends up there, too, because a substandard dam has busted and caused a flood.

At first, Bellamy -- the boring town banker, natch -- welcomes Bill and Mallory and hopes they tell the story of how corners were cut in the damn dam construction. But when the faulty work is traced to the town judge, the townspeople rally around him (and don't even try to talk to them about the negro situation). Allen is forced to destroy his incriminating film. Ya think he does it?

Meanwhile, Mallory gets back to town and her editor (our old pal Purnell Pratt) gives her a hot story -- a gangster's moll (our old pal Dorothy Burgess) is in the hospital and ready to sign a statement incriminating her boyfriend. So Mallory hotfoots it over and gets her story and the statement:

Then she leaves the hysterical moll in the hospital. Later, traitor!

But wait! Mallory is taken hostage by the gangster and his goons, and Bill and Ralph Bellamy leave no stone unturned in tracking her down. Once they find her, however, Mallory is more interested in phoning in an exclusive than in marrying Bellamy. This leads him to utter this heartfelt final statement:

Ralph Bellamy: I'm going home.

And, with the help of Bill, Mallory tells her story before the cameras:

Here are the complete credits for "Headline Shooter."

"The Story of Temple Drake," or Oh Brothel, Where Are Thou?

Around about 1932-33, Miriam Hopkins achieved what we might call a pre-code movie hat trick by appearing in three notorious examples -- "Trouble in Paradise," "Design for Living" and "The Story of Temple Drake."

The latter film, especially, is credited with being the straw that broke the pre-code camel's back, leading to the formation of the National Legion of Decency and the enforcement of strict movie censorship that would last until the mid-1950s. And even from the vantage point of 80 years, "Temple Drake" still packs a punch. Its lurid story deals with all kinds of pre-code hot button issues -- rape, incest, prostitution, illegitimate children, murder and agriculture.

We open down south in Dixon County, where Temple Drake (Hopkins) lives. She's a rich ninny -- the silly granddaughter of a local judge (Sir Guy Standing) who uses her beauty and his status to get pretty much anything she wants. Her life is a merry social whirl -- big parties! Late night revels! Formal dances with Grady Sutton!

Judge Drake is a respected figure, but he's not above sharing a shot of sour mash in his chambers between trials. And he's concerned about Temple's wild ways, but when she tells him not to worry, that the man she's out carousing with attends the judge's alma mater, he calms down.

Temple actually does have a secret love -- local attorney Stephen Benbow (William Gargan), who's noble enough to act as a public defender for those too poor to afford representation. At a ritzy party, Temple confesses to Stephen about her feelings for him, but she also talks about her untamed wild side. It's like the original "It isn't you, it's me" speech:



And once she confesses to Stephen, Temple goes back to the wild side of her personality, leaving the party to go for a joyride with Toddy (William Collier, Jr.), the drunken college boy from the judge's old school. Then there's an accident, and Toddy and Temple end up stranded at an abandoned plantation that looks like Scarlett O'Hara's place after the Civil War.

Living in the crumbling house is a motley crew -- bootlegger Lee Goodwin (Irving Pichel), slow-witted Tommy (James Eagles), Goodwin's common-law wife Ruby (Florence Eldredge) and their baby, and, most dangerous of all, the predatory Trigger (Jack LaRue), a small-time hood.

A storm is raging outside, and Temple is totally at sea -- for the first time in her life, she's trapped in a world where "I'm Judge Drake's granddaughter" doesn't mean anything. She tries to protect herself by staying with Ruby and her baby, who's sleeping in a wood box in the kitchen.

Temple: Why do you keep the baby in a wood box?

Ruby: So the rats won't get it.

Temple finally goes out to the barn and falls asleep in the corn crib. The simpleminded Tommy watches over her. But the snakelike Trigger is persistent, and we know there's trouble brewing when we see his shiny street shoes sliding across the hay-covered floor:



 Trigger kills Tommy and attacks Temple, and then he and a shellshocked Temple drive over a county or two and take up residence at Miss Reba's House of Ill Repute, Inc. It's interesting to look at the music on the soundtrack at this point -- up until now, Temple's trials have been punctuated by a nondescript orchestral score, but once we get to Miss Reba's all we hear in the background is a honky tonk piano. And somehow, it makes things seem even more nightmarish:



Meanwhile, back in Dixon County, the official story is that Temple's away visiting relatives. And Stephen remains the sole defender of Temple's honor, going into men's rooms and wiping "Temple Drake is just a fake/She wants to eat and have her cake" off the walls.

Then Lee Goodwin is charged in the murder of Tommy, and Stephen becomes his attorney. He sets out to find eyewitnesses. His trail leads to Trigger, and he's shocked to see Temple shacking up with him. Temple places herself between Trigger and Stephen to keep Trigger from shooting him, and tells Stephen she loves Trigger. Stephen leaves and Temple decides she's had enough. She puts on her hat to leave, but Trigger blocks her and starts pushing her around, and she shoots him. Then she tries to leave, but she realizes he's holding her hat:

  


Temple makes her way back to Dixon County, where Stephen calls her as a witness in Lee Goodwin's trial. But they both know that if she tells the truth, her reputation will be ruined. "Give me a chance to live it down," she pleads to Stephen -- and he has to decide whether he will serve justice or spare the woman he still loves.   

"The Story of Temple Drake" is based on William Faulkner's novel "Sanctuary," and considering what it couldn't include from the book, it very effectively retains the Southern Gothic flavor of Faulkner. Hopkins must have drawn from her experience as a native of Savannah, Georgia in conveying Temple's lethal charm.

And props, please, to Jack LaRue, who was given the part of Trigger when George Raft refused it. In a career of thankless roles, always as the bad guy, he actually seems half-human -- flattered and even slightly vulnerable -- in the scene where Temple pretends to be in love with him in order to save Stephen.

Here are complete credits for "The Story of Temple Drake," which by the way almost disappeared after its initial release. A restored version, courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, premiered at the Turner Classic Movies Film Festival in 2011.    

"The Animal Kingdom," or Fie, Society

To steal a line from his best-known work, "The Philadelphia Story," Philip Barry's plays were often about "the privileged class enjoying its privileges." But they also showed the other side of the coin: how easy it was to lose your self-respect -- and yourself, for that matter -- by getting caught up in living a life based solely on societal obligations and other people's expectations.

In Barry's "Holiday" and in "The Animal Kingdom," the 1932 film based on Barry's play, the expectations come from fiancees.

As "The Animal Kingdom" begins, Tom (Leslie Howard) has just gotten engaged to Cecilia, aka Cee (Myrna Loy). He is a proud iconoclast from a wealthy family -- he publishes limited-edition books, lives in a small (but elegant) house and prefers a simple life, with his household needs met by Regan (William Gargan), a former prizefighter who is his butler and friend.

Tom's love life has been nontraditional as well -- for years he lived with Daisy (Ann Harding) in a no-strings relationship based as much on the compatibility of their souls as it was on sex. Cee knows about it and seems very broadminded about the whole thing.


Tom (about Daisy): Well, we've been everything possible to each other, of course, but... 

Cee: Yes, Tom?

Tom: ...at the same time free as air. I mean, there has never been a feeling of conventional responsibility towards each other's involvement. 

Cee: I can understand that.

Tom: Can you, Cee? 'Cause I never could.
 
But now Tom is committed to marriage.

Tom: We must make a grand go of it.

Cee: We shall -- never you fear.

(Sounds a little like Katharine Hepburn talking to herself.)

Daisy has just gotten back in town and doesn't know Tom is engaged. He goes to tell her, but she has news of her own -- she's ready to marry Tom:



Daisy: Behold, the bridegroom cometh. And no oil for my lamp, as usual. A foolish virgin me. Well, foolish anyway.

The breakup is devastating to both of them because it also marks the end of a great friendship. Tom would like to stay friends, but Daisy is honest enough with herself to know she can't handle it.

We move forward a few months, maybe a year. Tom and Cee are now married, Daisy has decided to start painting and has her first showing scheduled. At home, Tom is starting to deal with those obligations -- Cee wants him to fire the rough-edged but good-hearted Regan. And he's bowed to her wishes and started publishing badly written, but successful, novels.

Tom dodges the bullet with Regan, who leaves on his own for another job. ("I feel somehow my luck's going with him," he tells Cee.) And he wants to go into town for Daisy's opening. Cee isn't keen on the idea -- she thinks Tom should just send a congratulatory telegram -- but she doesn't come out and say so. She has other ways of keeping Tom from leaving:



More time passes, and Cee is pressuring Tom to accept a buyout offer from a larger, mass-market publishing company. And she wants to move into the city and share the family mansion with Tom's domineering father. She also decides to meet the Daisy problem head on by inviting her out to the country for Tom's birthday. Daisy comes, and despairs over the change in Tom. She and her friends leave abruptly.

The film's final sequence is beautifully played by Howard and Loy. It's finally beginning to dawn on him that if things change, it will only be for the worst. They have an intimate supper in a sitting room -- a room that reminds Tom of his visits to a London bawdy house where you left your payment on the mantle. Cee doesn't like the comparison -- she wants Tom to "behave" and give in to her vision for their lives together. Tom doesn't explode, but you see the awareness dawning on him. Cee and Tom drink some champagne and Cee starts giggling about feeling naughty. She goes to the bedroom to wait for him. Tom takes out the birthday check he received from his father, for a sizable amount:

   

Exit Tom.

"The Animal Kingdom" deals with such pre-code subjects as cohabitation, prostitution and at least attempted adultery  The performances are uniformly fine -- Howard and Gargan are reprising their stage roles, as is Ilka Chase as one of Cee's silly rich friends. Harding is the free-spirited one here -- she played a similar character in the 1930 film version of Barry's "Holiday"; in the 1938 film version of "Holiday," Hepburn would play the role.

For once, Loy is the odd woman out, but hey -- since she's Myrna Loy, she's perfect. Just consider the range of her roles in 1932 -- as a mixed-race murderess in "Thirteen Women," an amorous countess in "Love Me Tonight," and the villain's hopped-up daughter in "The Mask of Fu Manchu."

The scenes with Tom and Daisy have great wit and heart, as do the scenes between Tom and Regan, who loves Tom almost as much as Daisy does. It's easy to see why Hepburn and Barry worked together so often -- he was writing of a world she knew intimately, and she was the Tom figure within her own family.

Here are the complete credits for "The Animal Kingdom."