Street of Women (1932)

Street of Women is a 1932 Warner Brothers pre-code melodrama directed by the prolific Archie Mayo.

The subject is marital infidelity and of course the great thing about pre-code movies is that you never know just how stories like this will play out.

Larry Baldwin (Alan Dinehart) is a tycoon who is building the world’s tallest building. In the past three years he has suddenly become immensely successful. They do say that behind every great man there’s a great woman. That’s true here. Except that the woman in this case is not Larry’s wife but his mistress.

His marriage to Lois (Marjorie Gateson) is an empty shell and has been for years.

His mistress is successful dress designer Natalie Upton (Kay Francis). She is his inspiration. They are madly in love. They have been having an affair for three years and this being a pre-code movie it leaves no doubt that they have been sleeping together.

Natalie’s kid brother Clarke (Allen Vincent) has been studying in Paris for three years. Now he’s back and that’s going to lead to a domestic cataclysm. Clarke is very very conventional. He is shocked and enraged at his sister’s illicit relationship.

There’s another complication. Clarke wants to marry Larry’s daughter Doris (Gloria Stuart ).

Larry thinks Doris will understand. She has always claimed to be a modern girl who does not believe in all that stuffy old-fashioned traditional morality stuff.

Unfortunately it turns out that Doris and Clarke are actually fanatical believers in the rigid enforcement of traditional morality.

Things are going to get messy.

Despite wishful thinking on the part of many modern critics and cinephiles pre-code movies by and large did not reject traditional morality. They were not trying to subvert that morality. They were not trying to subvert anything. What you do find in pre-code movies is the suggestion that maybe traditional morality doesn’t need to be rigidly and mercilessly enforced and that maybe moral lapses can be forgiven. That’s what differentiates pre-code movies from post-code movies. Once the Production Code started to be enforced there could be no suggestion that moral lapses could be forgiven. Such lapses had to be ruthlessly punished.

Pre-code movies are unpredictable and exciting because you just don’t know which way they will jump. A story such as this could end happily for Larry and Natalie or it could end in disaster for them. It could end in disaster for everyone.

All the performances are solid but Kay Francis is of course the standout performer. She was one of the great pre-code stars and this role is right in her wheelhouse.

Director Archie Mayo made some notable pre-code movies including the superb Svengali (1931). Under Eighteen and Illicit are also very much worth seeing. It was one those reliable journeyman directors for whom I have a lot of respect.

The characters have some depth and there’s plenty of moral complexity. Natalie and Larry realise that the revelation of their affair has hurt Doris and Clarke and they feel bad about that but at the same time they do not believe they have done anything wrong. All they did was to fall in love. Doris and Clarke are savagely judgmental but at the same time we can make allowances for them because they are very young. They’re not capable of understanding that Natalie and Larry need each other desperately.

This is a good romantic melodrama and it’s very pre-code and it’s highly recommended especially if you’re a Kay Francis fan.

The Warner Archive DVD looks very good.

Trangression (1931)

Trangression is a 1931 RKO romantic melodrama.

Elsie Maury (Kay Francis) is married to mining engineer Robert Maury (Paul Cavanagh). They live a quiet life in the English countryside until Robert has to spend a year in India for professional reasons. He thinks Elsie would be unhappy in India so he packs her off to Paris where she has friends.

You might think that sending a young beautiful wife, who for a year is going to be a young beautiful lonely wife, to Paris is not the smartest idea and you’d be right. In Paris she meets Don Arturo de Borgus (Ricardo Cortez). Arturo is handsome, dashing and exciting - everything her husband is not. They become involved, although Arturo insists to his friends that the relationship has not yet been actually technically improper.

After a year Elsie receives a telegram. Her husband will be arriving the next day. Elsie is somewhat relieved - she has found Arturo a bit too much of a temptation. Arturo is devastated. He feels he cannot live without her. If only he could persuade her to spend a few days with him at his villa in Spain.

Robert wants to return to England immediately but agrees that Elsie can follow him later. So she goes off to Spain with her handsome Latin Lover. She is playing a dangerous game and she doesn’t know the rules. She is remarkably innocent. She is totally under the spell of Arturo’s romantic aura and cannot see that he is a ruthless womaniser who will tell a woman anything to get her into bed. As you might expect it all goes horribly wrong for her and she might end up with no man at all.

Elsie has another problem - Robert’s moralistic control-freak sister who hates her.

And Robert is disturbed by the changes in Elsie. She now wears make-up, a sure sign of moral laxness.

The plot is pretty basic and it’s all a bit too contrived.

Is there any actress more unfairly neglected than the wonderful Kay Francis? She’s in fine form here as a complex woman who is neither an out-and-out bad girl nor a plaster saint. She’s human and she’s not immune to temptation. Her problem is that she thinks she’s a sophisticated woman of the world when in fact she knows nothing of the big bad world. Kay Francis was one of the great pre-code stars who found the transition to the moralistic atmosphere of the Production Code impossible to negotiate.

And Ricardo Cortez was one of the great male pre-code stars who had the same problem. He specialised in playing dangerous men who led women into temptation and those roles just dried up completely thanks to the Production Code. Two great careers blighted by the Code. Cortez is excellent here - you can imagine women finding his dangerous charm hard to resist.

It’s the performances of Kay Francis and Ricardo Cortez that make this film worth watching. Aside from that it has a few problems. Robert is such a bore that we can’t possibly care if he loses his wife or not. Arturo is a cad with no complexity at all. Elsie’s sister-in-law is a one-note interfering busybody. There’s also a villainous servant, and he’s pure villainy and cowardice. The only character we can care about is Elsie, and she’s so impossibly naïve that we feel exasperation rather than sympathy.

The clunkiness of early talkies is often exaggerated but this one really is a bit clunky.

The pre-code content consists of the idea (that would never have been countenanced once the Production Code started to be enforced) that maybe adultery is something that can be forgiven.

Trangression doesn’t quite come off mostly due to the weak script and the fact that the characters are so badly underwritten that they just don’t engage us the way that they should. Worth a look but don’t get your hopes up too high.

This movie is included in the five-movie Spanish Verdice Pre-Code RKO Volume 2 DVD boxed set. All five films are in English with removable Spanish subtitles and the transfers are fine.

Mandalay (1934)

Mandalay, a 1934 First National Pictures production, belongs to a sub-genre I dearly love - the pre-code tropical melodrama.

The movie opens in Rangoon. Tanya Borodoff (Kay Francis) and Tony Evans (Ricardo Cortez) are very much in love. Tony isn’t what you would call a respectable citizen. He’s a gun-runner. Tanya doesn’t mind. Tony has a big deal going with nightclub-owner Nick (Warner Oland). Tony has a problem - he doesn’t have the cash to pay for a shipment of guns and Nick won’t offer him credit. Nick offers Tony a tempting deal - he can have the money for the guns in exchange for Tanya. No decent man would sell his girlfriend, and certainly not to a man with Nick’s reputation. But money is money and women are easily replaced.

Nick’s nightclub is more than just a nightclub, it’s a brothel as well. Nick needs a new hostess to take charge and Tanya has the beauty and the class needed for the job.

Tanya is devastated, for a couple of hours. Then she shrugs her shoulders and accepts the situation. We are certainly meant to realise that Tanya has been, and is, somewhat flexible and free-and-easy in her morals. And she knows how to handle men.

She is now known as Spot White. She’s a success, but she is implicated in one scandal after another, as one man after another ruins himself over her. The British police commissioner in Rangoon decides to deport her, or at least he intends to deport her until she reminds him of certain indiscretions with the fair sex of which he has been guilty.

Tanya’s life in Rangoon has been rather exhausting so she decides to head for somewhere quiet to take things easy for a while. Mandalay sounds promising. On the steamer to Mandalay she meets Dr Gregory Burton (Lyle Talbot).

In classic melodrama style lots of plot twists follow, Tanya is caught between two men and all three main characters are trying to escape their pasts.

Ricardo Cortez was one of those actors whose careers were almost entirely ruined by the Production Code but in his pre-code heyday he was a solid second-tier star who was always very watchable. He always seemed to play characters who were up to no good, men with whom the heroine should avoid becoming entangled, but he was always fun.

Kay Francis was a huge star in the pre-code era but by the late 30s her career had more or less fizzled out. Like Ricardo Cortez she was a star who could only thrive in the free-and-easy atmosphere of pre-code Hollywood.

I’ve always had a soft spot for Lyle Talbot as well.

All three give extremely effective performances but the movie belongs to Kay Francis. She also gets to wear some fabulous slinky 30s dresses and she looks great. She’s absolutely at the top of her game here.

There’s no shortage of pre-code wickedness in Mandalay. Tanya is a high-class hooker and a sexual adventuress but she certainly isn’t condemned for making such choices. It’s better than just being a victim and feeling sorry for yourself which was the only other option available to her.

The plot goes places that would have been totally off-limits after 1934 and the ending is very pre-code indeed.

Michael Curtiz directs with style and energy, as he always did.

This movie demonstrates just how good Hollywood was in those days in creating exotic atmosphere without the need to do location shooting in exotic places. In fact the exotic overheated atmosphere in these early 30s tropical melodramas has a special magic that was lost when location shooting became all the rage. This is not reality. This is the fantasy world of Hollywood movies which is much more exciting and alluring.

This is top-notch sin and depravity in the tropics stuff. Mandalay is very highly recommended.

Mandalay is included in the Warner Archive Forbidden Hollywood Vol 6 set and it gets a very nice transfer.

Secrets of an Actress (1938)

Secrets of an Actress, directed by William Keighley, is a very lightweight 1938 Kay Francis romance, but within the limitations of its very modest ambitions it works quite well.

Kay Francis is Fay Carter, an actress still waiting for her big break. The daughter of a famous actor, she has achieved modest success but is growing tired of the grueling life on the road of a touring actress. She wants to stay put in New York, which means she has to make it on Broadway. She believes she’s about to land the part that will bring her what she wants but at the last minute she misses out.

Then fate intervenes - her friend Marian (Isabel Jeans) throws a punch in a bar. The punch leaves prominent architect Peter Snowden (Ian Hunter) with a black eye, but it serves to bring Fay and Peter together. Peter has always been slightly stage-struck and meeting Fay re-awakens his thirst for a life in the theatre. He has little acting talent, but he does have money. Besotted by both Fay and the theatre he cooks up a scheme to become a Broadway producer with the intention of launching Fay to stardom. His friend and business partner Richard Orr (George Brent) assures him he’s crazy and will lose his money but the play is a smash hit.

But of course there are complications. Fay is very fond of Peter but she’s fallen head over heels in love with Richard. And Richard has a wife. He’s been trying for years, without success, to persuade his wife to divorce him. Will true love triumph in the end? Since this is Hollywood there are no prizes for guessing the answer to that question.

Secrets of an Actress is one of those curious movies that expresses Hollywood’s strange inferiority complex in regard to the theatre. The characters in the film all express disdain for the movies and operate on the assumption that only stage acting is real acting. And yet of course this is a movie.

This is a movie that relies a good deal on the charm of the actors to keep us interested in spite of the flimsiness of the plot. Kay Francis often found herself in this position and she was usually equal to the task. She’s quite delightful in this film. As always she looks wonderfully glamorous - this was a woman who certainly knew how to wear clothes and her look perfectly encapsulates the style of the 1930s. My main concern was the casting of George Brent, an actor I generally dislike, but he’s extremely likeable in this one.

A little bit of Isabel Jeans as Marian goes a long way but she manages to just avoid being annoying. Ian Hunter does fairly well in the thankless role of the guy who is obviously not going to get the girl.

At just 70 minutes there’s little chance of boredom and overall this is a competent and enjoyable movie for those who are content to approach it without excessively high expectations.