One of the movies that's been sitting on my DVR for a long time was a little MGM movie I'd never heard of but sounded interesting, Fugitive Lovers. Recently, I sat down to watch it.
One of the fugitives is Letty, played by Madge Evans. She's a chorus girl in New York, and she's got gangster Legs Caffey (Nat Pendleton) all hot and bothered by her. The only thing is, she doesn't like the attention she's getting from Legs; presumably she'd rather get attention from somebody more respectable. So when he suggests the two of them go to Atlantic City to get married, she decides not to go to Atlantic City, but to get out of town in a different direction by hopping a cross-country bus headed for Los Angeles. Unfortunately for her Legs finds out what's going on and gets on the bus with her, claiming she's his wife.
The bus travels west, passing through a town in Pennsylvania that's home to one of the state prisons. Having just broken out of jail is Paul Porter (Robert Montgomery), who had a plan to get away by car with an accomplice. But when that plan goes south, Paul hops aboard the back of the bus, climbing up on the roof where the luggage was kept in those days and where he can get a change of clothes courtesy of fellow passenger Hector Withington (Ted Healy).
Now, well-read viewers may recall that Ted Healy is just as well known for being the manager of what would become the Three Stooges back in those days before they struck out on their own, so it's not a surprise that the Stooges appear here, although it's in a relatively straight role as a musical combo who are, like Withington, passengers on the bus. Anyhow, the buss reaches Harrisburg, where Paul is spotted, forcing him to go into hiding while Letty gets back on the bus as it heads farther west. Paul, already having met Letty -- and you know the two are going to fall in love -- vows to catch up with Letty in St. Louis.
Paul and Letty do meet in St. Louis, but Legs has also found them there, and threatens to out Paul until Legs realizes just how much Paul and Letty love each other, and has a change of heart. At this point, the movie has a surprising change of tone. It's the middle of winter, and Paul commandeers the bus in a snowstorm after everyone else gets out at one of those auto-camps like the one in It Happened One Night where Clark Gable tells Claudette Colbert how to eat a doughnut. The bus comes across a school bus that has gone off the road into a snowdrift, threatening to kill all the students like James Caan was nearly killed in Misery. Now if Kathy Bates had found this school bus....
When I first saw the plot synopsis of Fugitive Lovers and decided to DVR it, my thought was of another Robert Montgomery movie from the same era, Hide-Out. In fact, watching the movie made me think a lot more of It Happened One Night although IMDb says Fugitive Lovers was released a month before It Happened One Night (January 1934 vs. February 1934). Although there are definitely some thematic similarities between the two films, Fugitive Lovers is much more of an odd beast in that it feels like the movie is trying to tie together a bunch of disparate plot elements. It also has the issue of how to handle Montgomery being a criminal on the run, even though the Production Code wouldn't go into full effect until July of 1934.
Despite the oddness and being a decidedly lesser film than It Happened One Night, Fugitive Lovers is definitely interesting enough that it deserves a viewing. It probably should have gotten a DVD release one one of those old four-film box sets the Warner Archive used to put out, but as far as I can tell it never got a release, which is a shame.
No comments:
Post a Comment