Some time back I came across another pre-Code on TCM that I thought (correctly) I hadn't seen before. At least, I hadn't done a post on it; if I had seen it, it would have been ages ago. That movie is Bachelor Apartment. Having watched it, I can finally do the review on it.
The movie starts off with the bachelor, a wealthy businessman named Wayne Carter and played by Lowell Sherman. He's interested in lovely ladies, and there certainly seems to be some interested in him, such as married Agatha Carraway (silent star Mae Murray in a supporting role). But Wayne is decidedly not interested in marriage, despite causing a crash between his chauffered car and a taxi just becaues he's seen the female passenger in the car just as an excuse to get the woman to his apartment for lunch.
The scene then shifts from the lunch table at Carter's park avenue apartment to a lunch table in a much more modest apartment. In that apartment, we see two women having lunch. They're sisters, Helene (Irene Dunne) and Lita (Claudia Dell) Andrews, who have come to New York to try to make a better life for themselves in the early days of the Depression. Lita is a would-be chorus girl, although work is hard to come by. However, she claims to have been invited to eat with one Wayne Carter, even mentioning Carter's address before heading off to meet Carter.
Just after Lita leaves, Helene gets a telegram that's addressed to Lita, informing Lita that there's an audition coming up that afternoon. At least Lita had the good sense to leave Carter's address. Helene goes there and finds Carter, but with the woman from the taxi we met a few scenes earlier. However, Lita is there, having lunch with the butler who has apparently been passing himself off as Carter. But Carter himself, being ever the ladies' man, tries to put the moves on Helene and asks her to stay for dinner. Fat chance.
Helen finally gets a job in her preferred work as a stenographer, for the Retrac Investment Agency, which should be an incredibly obvious sign as to where the movie is going, since "Retrac" is simply "Carter" spelled backward. Carter needed a stenographer, and Helene needed a job, so Carter explicitly offers her a job. Helene once again has the perfectly reasonable view that Carter selected her just to be able to put the moves on her. Not only that, but Carter works behind the scenes to try to get Lita a job in a show that one of his friends is backing.
Again, it's not too difficult to figure out where the movie is going to go, which is that Carter finds that he's honestly in love with Helene in a way that he hasn't been in love with all those other women he's pursued. But every time he tries to prove it, something goes wrong to give Helene the impression that really he's still just after her for sex, not that they could talk about it that way even in a pre-Code movie. Eventually, the movie is going to get to its happy ending, although there are a lot of twists and turns along the way.
Bachelor Apartment is one of those movies that might have been interesting to audiences in the early 1930s, but to a lot of people watching today is going to seem incredibly dated and based on sex roles that have undergone a lot of change in the past 95 years. It's not that Bachelor Apartment is a bad movie; instead, it's more that it's an acquired taste. There are other pre-Codes out there that are more adventurous and more likely to be of interest to people who aren't necessarily into pre-Codes.
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