Some thoughts on some of what I've seen:
THE PUBLIC ENEMY
The prologue draws laughs from the audience, where Warner Brothers tells us they're depicting a dire social problem. Today, in our age of irony, the concept that any movie could sincerely see itself as concerned with the public welfare is lamentably hilarious.
This scene were James Cagney smashes a grapefruit into Mae Clarke's face is shocking. Wait! People in movies from 1931 aren't supposed to behave like this! It gives the impression that you're seeing something you weren't supposed to, that you're as shocked as Mae Clarke's character. It is graphic and violent and disturbing, but real.
(Mae Clarke is a kind of 1930's version of Michelle Williams. A kind of ordinary everywoman, but with poignancy grace and realism. Whereas, I think of James Cagney as an early version of Sean Penn: that sort of brutal yet sensitive masculinity.)
Jean Harlow looks astonishing. The way she wore clothes, arrayed and presented herself was stunning. It's not her acting ability so much, but her white-blonde style, the insane flair for glamour and the drop-drop, girl-next-door casualness with which she presented the extravagant fullness of her being. That contrast is what made her iconic.
BLONDE VENUS
A woman on the run. Dietrich has more chemistry with little Dickie Moore than she did with most leading men she was paired with.
She plays a mother and a nightclub star with an absent husband, so maybe this role was closer to Dietrich's truth than others.
Her daughter says Dietrich did not enjoy being a movie star, but approached it militantly, as if she was a Germanic soldier doing her duty. This lack of enjoyment is glaringly apparent later on.
Maybe being a soldier-actress was more tolerable in the early years, as here she seems to bear the weight of her fabulousness effortlessly.
Hot voodoo! Coming out of a gorilla suit in a blonde afro. It's enough to inspire legions of college thesis papers as to what it all means!
Her husband needs cancer treatment, so retired star and loyal wife Helen Faraday (Dietrich) resumes her onerous-yet-decadent stage performances to pay for his treatment. Proving that no good deed goes unpunished, Herbert Marshall returns and casts out his wife due to her liason with Cary Grant. (But really, who could resist?)
She hightails it from town to town, a lost soul. A wanted woman for abducting her child. It's a love story between mother and child. My favorite line is when someone says, "You don't look like you're from around her." She mutters bitterly: "Give me time..."
Von Sternberg is always interesting as a director, the way he composed space like a painter, creating depth with screens and veils and shadows, lights and darks. Foregrounds and backgrounds. It's fascinating to behold.
SIGN OF THE CROSS
The Sign of the Cross by Cecil B. DeMille contains the famous scene of Claudette Colbert as Empress of Rome bathing in asses milk. There are scenes where an orgy is taking place. Christians being fed to the lions. The fey Charles Laughton as Nero. It's exciting to watch for the bizarre and horrific sacrifical scenes at the end.
It can be read as an anti-fascist, anti-Nazi parable, though it came out in 1933 (the year the Nazis rose to power). The aristocratic Romans are like the Nazis in their fondness of pageantry, persecutory bloodlust and murder-as-entertainment aesthetic.
CALL HER SAVAGE
Clara Bow was kinda the pre-code equivalent of Britney Spears. High-strung but endearing, erratic but affecting. She plays the character with a bipolar
zeal, though not sure it was called such a thing back then.It's easy to see why this woman was a big star. Her lust for life is bracing. She
wrestles with an enormous dog just to say hello. She beats up other girls who off
end her honor, just because she can!This film is inadvertently racist, a product of it's times. Call Her Savage is the name of it. At the end of the picture Clara discovers she is half-Indian, born from a torrid affair her mother had. That explains why her Caucasian father never liked her much. And it explains her wild-woman behavior. (As she learns she's a half-breed you really expect Cher's "Half Breed" anthem to begin to play!)
The audience is meant to sympathize with noble tormented Clara. It's her genes that make her "savage": hence, the accidental racism!
The discovery for me in this was the gorgeously
handsome Gilbert Roland. The young Gilbert Roland was one of the most BEAUTIFUL men ever to grace the screen!!!!!
SHE DONE HIM WRONG
Gilbert Roland also plays in She Done Him Wrong, starring Mae West. Mae West always reminds me of Roseanne Barr. They have the same mannerisms, though Roseanne doesn't have Mae's smutty wittiness.
Mae is dripping in diamonds. One of the witty bon mots she speaks in this picture is: "When women
go wrong, men go right after them."
This is the first of two pictures she made with Cary Grant. I tend to like the other one, I'm No Angel, better than this one. They'd perfected their chemistry by then.
At the end he puts a ring on her finger and tells her he's imprisoning her, as his wife. They clutch adoringly. "You bad bad girl," he says and she coos "Mmmm."
Guess Mae West helped inspire this Code. She must've seemed threatening. There's no telling how far she could've gone with her smuttiness had the Code not intervened, neutering her scandalousness as an artist. Some of her jokes and double entendres are still provocative today.
THE BEST LITTLE WHOREHOUSE IN TEXAS
Across town at the Anthology, I recently took in a screening of The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas, which is very "pre-code"-flavored in it's naughty innocence. Risque but not raunchy, with coy smuttiness and flashes of flesh. It's not explicit but revels in pushing the boundaries just a little. There's a happy suggestiveness.
Wrapped in a deceptively wholesome package, a heart-warming fable calling for sexual liberation and the legalization of prostitution. A madam's last stand!
This movie just has everything in it! Laughter and tears, sex and music, naked boys dancing, Dolly's enormous bosoms and Burt's hairy chest. Rebukes to the kind of hypocritical moral crusade which instituted the Hays Code in the first place.
Dolly is sorta the spiritual daughter of Mae West. They're both essentially writers who created a star persona which is like a literary fictional character. Exaggerations of outward femininity, while their inner essence is macho and manly. Like any good drag queen, their outrageous glamour is a kind of overcompensation for what they're not.
