Capsule Reviews: Other Men's Women, The Lovers on the Bridge, The Lady Eve, The Purchase Price

Other Men's Women (William A. Wellman, 1931)

Mary Astor herself called this picture a piece of cheese, but cheddar can be mighty sharp. Astor plays one of the men's women, the wife of a chirpy railroad engineer (Regis Toomey) who becomes entangled with his co-worker Bill (Grant Withers), a fall-down drunk who cleans up nicely. With only 69 minutes, Wellman doesn't have time to mess around, meaning Bill and Lily have to fall for each other with such passion they risk everything before most people can even ask what the other does for a living. Wellman's sturdy direction stands back to let the actors work, which isn't the best strategy given how unsalvageable some of the dialogue is but works best when the two men confront each other while working the same engine, the camera calmly letting the tension mount then somehow pulling back even more within the cramped space to capture their fierce, farcical fisticuffs. Things only get more darkly absurd from there, but then part of the charm of a good Pre-Code is the flamboyant yet gritty way things invariably go to hell. In the meantime, have extra fun with James Cagney literally dancing away with the show in a bit part and Joan Blondell as a diner waitress who is, except for Bill, strictly A.P.O.: ain't puttin' out. Grade: B+

Gold Diggers of 1933 (Mervyn LeRoy, 1933)

Gold Diggers of 1933 bursts with such energy that it barely gets through its credits before Ginger Rogers enters in close-up singing a show tune. The number, choreographed by Busby Berkeley like the other three routines of the film, is massive, a grandiose paean to money that makes you forget the year in the title until creditors bust in at the song's climax to shut down the indebted production. The disconnect makes the intrusion of reality all the more amusing, more impressive considering how hard it is to top the comic highpoint of the gold-digger song "We're in the Money," complete with looming silver dollar setpieces and costumes of scantily clad showgirls wearing coins over their privates (as if announcing the toll for entry).

The creditors' blunt reminder of the world outside the theater, subsequently seen through the living conditions of the other three leads of the film: ingenue Polly (Ruby Keeler), torch singer Carol (Joan Blondell), and the sarcastic Trixie (Aline MacMahon). Forced to share an apartment, the three stoop to stealing neighbors' milk and have become so despondent over job searches that they've given up looking. And when their old producer, the irascible Hopkins, comes by with plans to make a production about the Depression, the fresh memory of his gaudy, glamorous oblivion suggests that such a show would capture the Great Depression with as much realism as Armageddon does astrophysics. Only the timely intervention of Polly's talented singer-songwriter (and mysteriously wealthy) boyfriend Brad secures Hopkins the money, exciting the girls but also raising suspicions.

Capsule Reviews: The Smiling Lieutenant, Ménilmontant, The Miracle Woman

The Smiling Lieutenant (Ernst Lubitsch, 1931)

A delightfully wicked musical that puts the Lubitsch touch on full display, The Smiling Lieutenant has the sophistication and subtly charged sensual construction one expects of the artist. Maurice Chevalier is a joy as the titular lieutenant Niki, putting his massive grins and thick accent to hysterically suggestive use with some lines that show Lubitsch, as ever, pushing himself to the limit of decency. Claudette Colbert, playing Niki's naughty true love, asks him whether the princess he's unwittingly been forced to marry is blond or brunette. "I don't know," replies Chevalier with a caddish grin, removing all doubt as to what hair he's really talking about. The songs are all jovial, but if you pay attention to the lyrics you realize they could be sung in a pub after a pint or four. It all ends with a demented (yet classy, natch) spin on Cyrano as Franzi teaches Anna how to make our lieutenant switch his affections, and a significant fade-out puts a wider smile on Niki's face than ever before. The way Miriam Hopkins looks when she finally grabs her husband's attentions? Hell, I'd be singing too. Grade: A-

Ménilmontant (Dimitri Kirsanoff, 1926)

The phrase "avant-garde Russian silent cinema" is redundant; I've yet to see a Russian film from the '20s that was anything less than confrontational and experimental, even when it amounted to nothing more than naïve propaganda. Ménilmontant named for the Parisian suburb where it was shot, may technically be a French work, but one need not be told that a Russian emigré directed it to know its true national roots. Opening with an unexplained, terrifyingly edited and grisly axe murder of the parents of two young girls, Ménilmontant soon morphs into an abstracted tale of grief and isolation, following the sisters as they grow up and slowly drift apart when one of them gets a lover. A host of silent-era techniques—including double exposure, superimposition, impressionistic close-ups, mood-setting pillow shots of buildings and nature, and, of course, montage—create a manic state of bewilderment and poetic terror as the women discover what a harsh world it really is out there for a lady. This neglected masterwork feels like a proto-feminist, modernist fairy tale as made by Dziga Vertov. With potential like that, who needs intertitles? Grade: A+

The Miracle Woman (Frank Capra, 1931)

An improvement over Capra and Stanwyck's first collaboration, chiefly because Capra, having figured out how to work with Stanwyck's style, now knows how to get even more out of her. The story itself is simple, but it's noteworthy that Capra would rework its basic theme—a protagonist giving up prestige and wealth for morality and/or love—several times after Hays office cracked down but always with the more acceptable male lead instead of a strong-willed female played with fiery, if fabricated passion by Stanwyck. Oddly prescient in its depiction of ludicrously ostentatious evangelism (shame Jerry Falwell never stuck his fat ass in a lion cage for a stunt), The Miracle Woman boasts three unforgettable setpieces in its first 20 minutes. The second half doesn't match the brilliant staging of Stanwyck's opening sermon, theatrical debut as a charlatan (she emerges on-stage over roused men like the dancing robot in Metropolis) and the averted suicide of the sweet blind man, an otherwise grating presence who often plays like a self-treating Patch Adams. I was also mildly disappointed that its rich potential for social commentary gave way to the usual Capra story of an affirming romance. Nevertheless, Capra's increasing visual sophistication, Stanwyck's dynamic performance and a flirtation with the dark side of Pre-Code immorality make this one of the director's more enjoyable pictures. Grade: B

Baby Face (Alfred E. Green, 1933)

There is something indefinite about Barbara Stanwyck's overpowering effect, a subconscious response triggered by an almost imperceptible shift in body language. A lightly cocked eyebrow, a slight repositioning of a leg, all tiny, calculated moves designed for a delayed response to a beauty that, mere moments ago, didn't seem remarkable but is suddenly intoxicating. She made the perfect seductress, someone who doesn't announce herself from afar but waits to ensnare men as they pass by, forcing a double-take that draws them in more wholly and madly than the bombshells. Those ladies wielded their bombshell-selves like the artillery for which they were named, but Stanwyck got up close and personal. If love is a battlefield, she was a black-ops guerrilla. There's a line in Joseph McBride's Capra biography that calls her beauty "proletarian," which is indicative not only of the unexpected power of her uncommonly common looks but of the forceful impact of that beauty when it was unleashed.

Yet despite this singular power, Stanwyck possesses the capacity to portray this Venus flytrap man-baiting as something other than sinister sexual warfare. Sure, everyone remembers her turn in Double Indemnity, one of the bar-setters for the femme fatale icon, but compare her man-devouring turn there to her more enamored brush with hapless innocence in Ball of Fire, where she in no way softens her appeal but manages to fall for a man so resolutely innocent that she must overcome pangs of shame for being with him. Even when she was naughty, which was always, Stanwyck could find ways not only to unearth some nugget of guilelessness in her tramps but to suggest that her forthright seduction was a valid expression of sexual identity. I would say this was incredible given the time period in which she worked, but never mind all that: when's the last time a film made today gave its females such nonjudgmental sexual freedom?

Blood Money (Rowland Brown, 1933)

Rowland Brown's snarling Pre-Code feature Blood Money was thought lost for decades, perhaps out of wishful thinking for decency's sake. The story of cop-turned-amoral bondsman Bill Bailey (George Bancroft), Blood Money is an unsentimental, occasionally repellent dive into the criminal underworld by way of one of its transitory members. Bill talks a big game and hands out Cuban cigars by the handful, but his arrogance is tempered by the quiet knowledge that the criminals he considers friends and allies will desert him at the earliest sign of trouble.

The Depression-era underworld Brown drifts through is a topsy-turvy fever dream of transvestism, bootlegging and sadomasochism. There's no moral to offset the madness of the film's crime-ridden social pits; if anything, Brown considers crime a completely viable form of business in the Depression. Without it, how would you know you were in the city?