Sadie McKee

I thought I had blogged about Sadie McKee before, but a search of the blog claims I haven't. Having recently watched it and it being available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, now you get a review of it.

Joan Crawford plays Sadie, who at the start of the movie is a domestic, having grown up with her cook mother in the home of the Aldersons. Their son Michael (Franchot Tone) is a lawyer who is in love with Sadie, but she's in love with a man from her social class, Tommy (Gene Raymond). Michael bad-mouths Tommy, so what does Sadie do? She gets together with Tommy and runs off to New York to elope with him!

But perhaps there was a reason Michael bad-mouthed Tommy and Sadie should have been with Michael. Sadie and Tommy arrive in New York too late to get married that day, so they get a room in a rooming house with the plan to get married the next day. Sadie looks for a job in the morning and plans to meet Tommy who is going to get the marriage license. But while she's out looking, Tommy meets a traveling performer who offers Tommy a job on the spot, which he takes even though it requires traveling and separation from Sadie.

Sadie, being in need of a job, gets one in a nightclub as a dancer. This is the sort of 1930s clubs that rich guys went to and threw away lots of money, including on dancers and waitresses who hoped to snag a rich man. Not that Sadie was expecting that, but it's going to happen anyway. Rich guy Jack Brennan (Edward Arnold) shows up one day and immediately falls in love with Sadie, who sees things more in terms of how this might be beneficial to her, not that she wants to hurt Jack.

There are two problems with Jack, however. One is that he's an alcoholic. The other is that among his friends is... Michael Alderson! So now he knows what Sadie's done with herself, and he knows (or at least is convinced) that it's going to be bad news for Sadie if she hooks up with Jack. Still, she does so, and even tries to help Jack sober up when she learns that if he doesn't sober up it will kill him. But she's still in love with Tommy....

Sadie McKee is one of those 1930s melodramas that are interesting if you don't focus too much on the plot, which really doesn't make that much sense. Crawford plays a lot of characters like this at MGM in the first half of the 1930s, and she does a perfectly fine job with it. Edward Arnold is also surprisingly good both as a drunk and as the fundamentally decent human who doesn't want to hurt Sadie. Raymond isn't around much, and Franchot Tone is acceptable at least.

Sadie McKee is nothing special, but there's also nothing really wrong with it. It works well enough as a vehicle for Joan Crawford, and is enough to hold the interest of anybody who's already a fan of 1930s melodrama.