More Ferenc Molnár

Hungarian writer Ferenc Molnár wrote a lot of works, mostly plays, that have been turned into movies on multiple occasions, as we most recently saw with Blonde Fever. A movie that I had recorded not knowing that it was based on yet another work by Molnár is The Bride Wore Red. Having finally gotten around to watching it, now's the time to do the review on it.

In Trieste, Italy, two upper-class gentlemen go slumming, the Count Armalia (George Zucco) and his friend Rudi Pal (Robert Young). The restaurant they go to has a bunch of women who are barely scraping by in life working there, and Armalia suggests that, Pygmalion-style, he could turn one of these women into a proper lady with the right clothes, grooming, and accent. Needless to say, we're going to find out if that is in fact the case, as the scene cuts to a singer at the club.

That woman is Anni Pavlovitch (Joan Crawford), and after her number, the count calls her over to give her the chance to test his theory, unbeknownst to Rudi. He'll get some good clothes for Anni and come up with a new identity for her, and then send her off to a resort in South Tyrol, which is part of Italy but has a large German population thanks to it having been part of Austria until the end of the Great War. Anni agrees to the proposition, giving her two weeks at a hoity-toity resort, but on the agreement that the count get her a red dress that will be hers to keep.

Cut to the train to the resort, where Anni, now named Anna Vivaldi, gets off, greeted by the telegraph operator/chauffeur Giulio (Franchot Tone), who was of course Joan Crawford's real-life husband at the time. Giulio is a relatively simple man, and you can guess that he's going to fall for her and that Anni is going to have mixed feelings about which man to choose.

OK, I'm getting a bit ahead of myself, but you know there's going to be another man. Before that, however, we learn that there's going to be at least one person at the resort who knows Anni's secret, that person being one of the chambermaids (not Armalia, who isn't there), which is a big problem since Anni is supposed to be a different social class from the chambermaid. As for the other man, that unsurprisingly turns out to be Rudi, who is at the resort together with his fiancée Maddalena and her father, an admiral (Reginald Owen).

You'll note I mentioned that Rudi is engaged, which presents further plot complications as it won't do for an engaged man to fall in love with one of the other guests at the resort. At the same time, however, it comes up with an interesting dilemma, which is whether Rudi will still love Anni if he finds out she's a working girl, or whether Anni will run off with Giulio. Quite a few of the comedies of the late 1930s had rich guys falling for working women where we knew they were supposed to wind up together in the final reel.

That having been said, The Bride Wore Red doesn't quite sparkle for some reason. I'm not quite sure why, considering the provenance from Ferenc Molnár, together with a very creditable cast. It's also the sort of material that was well-suited to MGM and their production values. But for whatever reason, it consistently feels slightly off, probably because Joan Crawford is never really convincingly Italian.

That's not to say The Bride Wore Red is bad; it's more that everybody in the cast had other stuff that they could point to as better. Still, Joan Crawford fans will definitely like this one, and it's another good example of how MGM seemed more able to put glitz on a movie than possibly any other studio in the golden age.