Flesh

For some reason, I thought I had blogged about Flesh before, but a search of the blog says that I haven't. It's going to be on TCM again tomorrow at 7:30 AM, so now would be the perfect time to do a post on it.

Karen Morley plays Laura Nash, who's in a prison in Weimar Germany because of some con that she and her boyfriend Nicky Grant (Ricardo Cortez) committed. However, Nicky got Laura knocked up, so the German authorities release her on a compassionate parol. (You'd think they would deport her, but that doesn't happen for whatever reason.) Laura tries to get the authorities to let Nicky out, too, but no dice if she can't pay the fine. Laura, not having any money, can't do that.

She can, however, go to a beer garden and order a substantial meal, even though she doesn't have the money to pay for it or any place to stay. Working at the beer hall is Polakai (Wallace Beery), who works there to earn a modest living and lives in an apartment above the place owned by his bosses, Mr. and Mrs. Herman (Jean Hersholt and Greta Meyer). His real dream, however, is to win the German wrestling championship, and benig a strongman, he entertains the patrons at the beer hall by carrying barrels of beer over his shoulder and serving the guests that way.

Polakai sees Laura and immediately falls in love with her, offering to pay the bill for her and letting her stay at his apartment. Laura is no dummy, and no honest woman either, so she decides she's going to take Polakai for as much as she can, or at least enough to bail Nicky out of prison and get the two of them back to America. Polakai is so dumb and in love with Laura that when he catches her stealing from him, he actually believes her story about the money being to free her "brother" from prison.

Nicky, on getting out of prison, is none too pleased to find Laura living with Polakai, but he plays along because there's not much else to do. He does, however, treat Laura badly, leaving Polakai and the viewer to ask why Laura likes Nicky. The one thing Nicky can't stand, however, is finding out that Laura is pregnant, since she didn't have the chance to tell Nicky this with his being in prison. Nicky believes Polakai is the father, so he takes the money Polakai was giving to Laura and uses it to get back to the US. Laurs doesn't tell Polakai who the actual father is, but marries Polakai nonetheless.

Polakai eventually wins the German wrestling championship, and now it's time to head across the Atlantic to try to win the world championship. He and Laura go to America, where he looks up the Hermans who have also emigrated and Laura looks up Nicky, still being in love with him. I said before that Polakai is stupid, and stil stupid enough to trust Nicky when he suggests that he should be Polakai's manager. Polakai doesn't realize that he's being set up and the matches are being rigged. When he learns of Nicky's part in this, trouble wil be brewing....

Flesh is an interesting little pre-Code, although it's a bit odd considering how much you have to shake your head at the characters' motivations. Wallace Beery does well with a role that he probably could have done in his sleep, and Ricardo Cortez is suitably oily. It's always nice to see Karen Morley get a bigger role. If there's one big problem, it's with the title: one would hope to see Karen Morley's flesh, but one only gets Wallace Beery's flesh.

Flesh, while not one of the most prestigious or most lurid movies of the pre-Code era by any means, is still a nice example of the filmmaking of the era and one that's definitely worth a watch.