For some values of sin

Tomorrow, October 22, is the birthday of actress Constance Bennett, but I already have a post planned for tomorrow for a movie that's airing early in the morning of October 23, so my Bennett mention is coming a day before her birthday. And, it's not as if TCM is doing anything for Bennett's birthday this year since they're running a bunch of horror stuff. But I had a movie on my DVR starring Bennett, and saw that I hadn't done a post on it before, so I watched it, wrote up, and scheduled this review. That movie is Sin Takes a Holiday.

Constance Bennett stars as Sylvia Brenner, who ekes out a living as a secretary to upper-crust divorce lawyer Gaylord Stanton (Kenneth MacKenna). As such, she sees all the ways wealthy women try to obtain divorces but have trouble doing it since no-fault divorce was not a thing back in the day. The low income also forces Sylvia to live with roommates, which isn't really that germane to the plot beyond highlighting Sylvia's economic circumstances and allowing us to mention ZaSu Pitts' presence in the cast as Sylvia's roommate.

Sylvia has a flame for Gaylord, not that she could talk about it, and not that he has the same feelings. Gaylord isn't a jerk; he just sees Sylvia as a co-worker and at best a friend. After all, he is her boss. Gaylord prefers dalliances with married women, largely because he's not ready to marry and knows how they can't really get a divorce quickly so the relationship can never progress too far, which is how he likes things. That is, until one such married woman, Grace (Rita LaRoy), decides that she's planning to get a divorce from her husband so that she can marry Gaylord.

Poor Gaylord is in a quandary, so he offers a proposal to Sylvia. One is that it is in fact a marriage proposal. But the other point is that it's a business proposition. Sylvia should enter into a sham marriage with Gaylord, with the agreement that they can get a divorce in a year. Gaylord will even provide Sylvia with the money to live abroad for a year. What Gaylord gets is the ability to tell Grace that he's already got a wife, and the evidence to prove that he's not lying about it. Sylvia accepts, and promptly sets off for Paris.

On the boat there, she meets one of Gaylord's acquaintances, Reggie Durant (Basil Rathbone), who is a decided bachelor who avoids relationships in New York but not in Europe. So he decides to help Sylvia out, falling in love with her even though she's technically married. But then the agreement is that she only has to be married to Gaylord for a year. This, even though she should know that it might not be so easy to get a divorce once that year is up since she and Gaylord will need to show cause. Eventually, Sylvia decides to go back to New York to have it out with Gaylord so that the two can decide their futures.

Sin Takes a Holiday is one of those early talkies (this one was released in late 1930) that show a decidedly different set of social mores than what we have nowadays, and for that, it's interesting. But it's also the sort of material that's going to be a bit difficult for people who aren't big fans of old movies already, largely because trying to understand people's character motivations within the confines of those social mores can sometimes seem baffling. Sin Takes a Holiday also doesn't sparkle the way that some comedies dealing with upper-crust divorce from that era did. In short, Sin Takes a Holiday is another of those movies where nobody involved should have felt embarrassed about having been involved with it, but where it's also obvious why it's not well-remembered almost a century on.

Three Faces East

A year or so ago, when TCM had a festival of B movies, one of the selections was a 1940 movie called British Intelligence, based on a World War I-era play called Three Faces East. The play was made into a silent film, and then again at the beginning of the sound era with the same title as the play Three Faces East, so when TCM ran the 1930 version, I recorded it and recently got around to watching it.

The movie opens up on the Western Front during World War I. In Belgium, a man named Valdar (Erich von Stroheim) is getting a medal from the Belgian Army. At about the same time as this, we're transferred behind the German lines. They've captured a nurse to be a POW, but it turns out that despite her being British, she's really working as a double agent, with the code name Z-1 (Constance Bennett). Being in field hospitals enables her to gather intelligence, and eventually she's able to convince her "captors" of her identity as Z-1.

The Germans have an idea for her. One of their former POWs was a man named Robert Chamblerain, son of one of the Lords of the Admiralty, Sir Winston Chamberlain (the original William Holden, not the one who worked with von Stroheim on Sunset Blvd.). Robert is dead, and the Germans will send Z-1, taking on the name Frances Hawtree, to visit the Chamberlains under the ruse that, as a field hospital nurse, she too was taken POW and became the lover of Robert before she died. Of course, her real job is to get inside the Chamberlain house and gather intelligence which she'll pass on to the unseen Blecher.

Surprisingly, Frances' ruse works, although that's in part because the Germans collected a bunch of Robert's personal effects for Frances to bring to London to give to the Chamberlains. Still, a bunch of the military types are suspicious of anybody and everybody. Heck, they're even suspicious of Valdar whom they know has German ancestry even though he's Belgian. (There's still a small German-speaking minority in Belgium, in the southeast along the German and Luxembourg borders.) They're right to be suspicious, since Frances' contact between herself and Blecher turns out to be Valdar.

So we now have the British military on one side, and a known nest of German spies under the same roof as the British. This being a movie from 1930, and since we know that the English won the war, we can assume that the Germans are not going to win this skirmish in the war. And if you saw the remake British Intelligence you'll know that too. But how this happens is something you'll have to see.

This version of Three Faces East is pretty well done, at least within the context of the early sound technology of the era and the story's provenance as a stage play. There are better movies out there, but the studios were in need of material in 1930, so an adapted stage play like Three Faces East adequately fit the bill.

Rockabye

Back in August, Constance Bennett was selected for Summer Under the Stars, and I pointed out that I had watched one of her movies scheduled that day, Rockabye, some time back, with the plan of watching it again for the next time it showed up on TCM. Well, it's on again tomorrow (Feb. 6) at 9:00 AM as part of a day of Joel McCrea's movies, so now is a good time to do a longer post on it.

Constance Bennett is clearly the star here, not McCrea. She plays Judy Carroll, a stage actress with a complicated personal life. She's hoping to adopt a child, but she's made the mistake of having an affair with a corrupt politician, Al Howard (Walter Pidgeon in an early role). He's now on trial, and her testifying against him causes her to lose custody of the child she was hoping to adopt. Her manager, Antonie (Paul Lukas, also in an early role), suggests that she go off to Europe for a while until the scandal dies down. She's got a public that will forgive her, an dafter a suitable absence she can go back on the stage. Another of the complications in Judy's personal life is that Antoine has always held a flame for Judy, even though Judy has apparently seen the relationship as professional, not personal.

While in Europe, Judy reads a play called Rockabye, and thinks it would be perfect for her, although Antoine doesn't really hold the same opinion. Judy gets the reasonable idea of contacting the playwright, Jacob van Riker Pell (Joel McCrea); perhaps he can help convince Antoine that Judy is right for the part. Jacob is hesitant at first, although as more of Judy's back story is revealed, he begins to realize that perhaps Judy might be right for the part after all.

But we need some more personal complications for Judy, and the obvious one is that Judy is going to begin to fall in love with Jacob, and this time, the feeling is mutual. Here, though, there's another catch. Jacob is married, although it's a loveless marriage, and Jacob is trying to get a divorce. Perhaps once the divorce is final, Judy and Jacob can get married, and then they'll have a nice respectable relationship.

In any case, rehearsals for the play Rockabye go on, and eventually the play has its premiere on Broadway, even though Jacob doesn't show up for the after-show party. That's because there are yet more complications in Jacob's relationship....

Rockabye the movie is one of those movies that to me feels like a decided product of its time. Not so much 1932 as part of the pre-Code era, but 1932 as before even World War II started liberating women, never mind the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. The film's central conceit, that Judy's personal life is somehow career-ending scandalous, seems a bit quaint 90 years on. Nowadays, I don't think people would care that much if a Judy-like actress had a complicated personal life and then fell in love with a married playwright.

Having said that, however, the performances are adequate, and Rockabye is certainly an interesting look at a time that was completely different. As they like to say, the past is like a different country.

The Unsuspected

Back in September, I used the movie The Unsuspected in an edition of Thursday Movie Picks, not realizing at the time that the movie would be on TCM later that month. I knew I hadn't blogged about it before, so I recorded it to watch and do that review.

Claude Rains plays Victor Grandison, who hosts a true-crime radio show in New York. His secretary Roslyn works in out of his study/office at his nice home up in Westchester. One night, as Victor is coming home from the show, Roslyn gets a call from Victor's cousin Althea (Audrey Totter). But during the call, we see Roslyn get strangled by somebody, with the killing then disguised to look like a suicide! And Althea doesn't bother to tell the police.

We then learn that it's technically not Victor's house. The house belongs to Victor's niece (apparently by another sibling, different from Victor and whoever begat Althea) Matilda, and Victor has been her guardian ever since her parents died. Or, at least, the house did belong to her. She went off to Portugal for some reason, and the boat sank, killing her. And if you think that's not complicated enough, things are about to get a whole lot more complicated.

First, we meet an obliging young man, Steven Howard (Ted North, whose on-screen career didn't go anywhere after this movie, and who is credited as Michael North). He shows up in the middle of a party, claiming that he had gotten married to Matilda just before she set off for Lisbon. Victor naturally suspects that Mr. Howard is after Matilda's money, but it just so happens that he's got wealthy parents of his own. But then even nuttier is that, as in My Favorite Wife, Matilda (played by Joan Caulfield) informs everybody that she was picked up by a trawler which returned to Brasil, so she's going to be flying up from Brazil.

And that's only half of the insanity. Steven wants to be the first to greet his wife when she arrives at the airport, so he goes alone. And when she sees Steven... she doesn't recognize him at all! So Steven could in fact be after Matilda's money after all. Or maybe it could be Althea. She's trapped in a loveless marriage with Oliver (Hurd Hatfield), and is decidedly resentful at having to live off the good graces of Matilda.

And we still haven't answered the question of who killed Roslyn, and why. Eventually, we do learn the who, although the killer is revealed enough before the end that the movie turns into a suspense movie instead of a mystery. Also, Victor discovers that Steven has a love photograph from Roslyn in his wallet. So why did he marry Matilda? Or is that a ruse, too?

The big problem with The Unsuspected is that the plot is way too convoluted for its own good. And then, thanks to the presence of the Production Code, you know that the bad people are going to have to get their punishment in the end while the good people have to have their doings explained. This is done, but not in a particularly satisfactory way. I don't think the why of the Roslyn killing was ever mentioned; nor is it explained why Matilda went to South America instead of Portugal.

Still, this being a product of the Hollywood studio system with a classy star like Claude Rains and a top-tier director like Michael Curtiz, you know you're going to get a product that's well made in aspects of the movie apart from the messy script. Rains, unsurprisingly, does well, as does Totter. The other men in the proceedings come off relatively worse, or at least the two man supporting men. Veteran character actor Fred Clark is more than competent in a dramatic role as the police detective.

It's easy to see, however, why The Unsuspected is one of those movies that despite the star power has fallen through the cracks over the ensuing 75 years and is less remembered than other movies from that era of Hollywood. Still, it's definitely worth a watch.

Hal Roach remakes My Man Godfrey

Another of the movies that I recently watched off my DVR is Merrily We Live, which I think got a TCM airing during a Constance Bennett day in Summer Under the Stars. I'd never blogged about it before, which is why I made the point of recording it so I could do a post on it here.

We start off with the hired help, led by Grosvenor the butler (Alan Mowbray), being irritated because all the good silver is missing. That's because the lady of the house, Mrs. Kilbourne (Billie Burke), has had a bad habit of bringing in "forgotten men", not that this movie uses that term the way My Man Godfrey did, and trying to reform them. One of those tramps decided to walk off with as much of the silver as he could carry. So it's going to be a nice surprise for the family when they have their breakfast this morning and have to use whatever utensils are at hand.

In addition to Mom, there's the father (Clarence Kolb) who's big in business and trying to get in with the politicians who hold sway; an adult daughter Geraldine "Jerry" (that's Constance Bennett if you couldn't tell) who is as close to a rational person as you'll find in this family; adult son Kane (Tom Brown) who looks like he's never worked a day in his life; and the stereotypical bratty teenage kid Marion (Bonita Granville), a few years older than the Virginia Weidler character in The Philadelphia Story and not nearly as charming. At least they're all able to convince Mom not to bring in another tramp.

Cut to a winding mountain road that seems to be much too far away from the house where the Kilbournes live for the story to work. Wade Rawlins (Brian Aherne) is driving a jalopy up the road, and stops to get water for the car's radiator, at which point the car rolls backward off a cliff. Rawlins walks down the hill to call for help, and apparently the first house he finds is the Kilbourne place. He tries to ask if he can make a phone call, but Mom is so ditzy that she winds up hiring Rawlins on as a chauffeur before he can explain who he is and what he wants.

Jerry already has a guy pursuing her in the form of Herbert wheeler, but we see that he's pursuing her too fast and how Rawlins has to save her from Wheeler's advances. It's obvious that Jerry is going to fall in love with Rawlins by the end of the movie, although she doesn't know it yet. Meanwhile, Dad is going to be hosting an important dinner, but Marion decides she's going to be a jerk and bollix things by having Rawlins get invited to the dinner when everybody in the family thinks he's a tramp.

Merrily We Live is the sort of screwball comedy that wouldn't have been so bad if it came out two years earlier, before the release of My Man Godfrey, in which case it would be the sort of movie you could look at and see why My Man Godfrey was the better movie. Unfortunately, it came later, so it's hard not to think of producer Hal Roach as ripping off My Man Godfrey. The other problem Hal Roach had is that I don't think he ever really had a particularly big budget to work with. Everything here feels slightly threadbare.

Still, Merrily We Live isn't exactly a bad movie, it's just that there are so many classics of the genre, a standard which Merrily We Live doesn't quite reach.

Our Worses

Some time back, TCM ran the film adaptation of the W. Somerset Maugham play Our Betters. Not having seen it before, I decided to record it and eventually watch it to do a review on here.

Constance Bennett plays Pearl Saunders, an American heiress who marries Lord Grayston (Alan Mowbray, seen only at the beginning of the movie), in part for his title; he's married her for her money because he's one of those British nobles who have lost most of their money (see Gosford Park for an example). Pearl, now Lady Grayston, decides that she's going to shake up the joint, so to speak, by doing her own thing and causing a general scandal among the members of Britain's smart set nobility

Some years later, Lady Grayston is in the same position as her husband as he's spent most of the money. She's also taken on a paramour in the form of Arthur Fenwick (Minor Watson). She decides to introduce her kid sister Bessie (Anita Louise), who's come over from America, to her new social circle and possibly marry Bessie off into the circle. Bessie, for her part, had a fiancé back in America in the form of Fleming Harvey (Charles Starrett).

So Lady Grayston hosts one of those weekend-long parties (again, see Gosford Park) for a couple of her friends and the men in their lives. The Duchess Minnie (Violet Kemble-Cooper) is being pursued by Pepi (a very young Gilbert Roland); Lord Harry (Hugh Sinclair) is there for Lady Grayston to introduce to Bessie; there's a princess (Phoebe Foster) and an American businessman Thornton Clay (Grant Mitchell).

Pepi winds up wooing Lady Grayston and the two go off for a tryst in the teahouse; Minnie is unsurprisingly pissed and sends Bessie to go off and find her sister with Pepi, which understandably pisses off Bessie, who no longer wants any part of this lifestyle. Lady Grayston and Minnie are generally bitches to each other for reasons that I couldn't quite fathom.

The big problem that I had with Our Betters is that it's way too talky, and complicated enough that it could use a second viewing to figure out everything that's going on. The fact that few of the characters are very sympathetic doesn't help either. One high spot is the final scene, with the dance instructor brought from London, who is played as the sort of incredibly stereotypical gay that you wonder how it could have gotten done even in the pre-Code days of 1933.

Our Betters is another of those movies that would probably benefit from being on a box set; I think there are enough adaptations of Maugham's work in the Turner Library (after all, they have The Letter from Warner Bros. and The Painted Veil from MGM) to pull it off. Instead, I could only find it on a standalone DVD from the Warner Archive.

Constance Bennett's morning routine

TCM has a short on the schedule early this evening called Constance Bennett's Daily Beauty Ritual, although IMDb says the title is Daily Beauty Rituals. Either way, it's airing a little after 7:50 PM, just after Dangerous Crossing (one of several TCM premieres for Jeanne Crain's day in Summer Under the Stars, although I've recommended a couple of them, including Dangerous Crossing when they showed up over on the Fox Movie Channel) which starts at 6:30 PM.

The short starts with Constance Bennett being waking up in bed, although of course it's a bed in a studio. No way are they getting those massive Technicolor cameras into a private home. The rest of the short is Bennett telling us about her daily routine of applying make-up to make herself look beautiful, because dammit, every woman should look beautiful. Well, of course, Bennett doesn't use the word "dammit"; the folks enforcing the Production Code wouldn't have let her. But that's about all the short is on the face of it.

And yet, watching this brief one-reeler, there's so much defying logic. First, how much make-up was Bennett wearing in the opening scene when she wakes up? Since this is ostensibly a short about her daily ritual, she probably shouldn't have any make-up on, and yet she does. And how much of that make-up is "regular" make-up -- by that I mean the sort of make-up that women watching this short in a theater back in 1937 would have used -- and how much of it is studio make-up necessary for going on camera? A short about the Hollywood make-up artists and their work, using somebody like Bennett as a subject, would have been an interesting historical document? And does she really go through this morning routine? If she's going to be making a movie, shouldn't she go in to the studio without any make-up, so that the make-up appropriate for her role can be applied at the studio? (Unelss of course you're Tootsie, and claim you need to apply your own makeup because you have an allergy to the regular stuff.)

Finally, who had the idea to make this one in the first place, and what was the rationale for making it? Ultimately, the whole short comes across as a curiosity, but also a bit of a head-scratcher. But at least it's a nice one to have left behind.