The Bad One

Edmund Lowe jumps ship in Marseilles and gets tangled up with tavern dancer Dolores Del Rio, who's tangled up with Don Alvarado. Lowe left Brooklyn because of a dame, so he's not anxious to fall for someone like Del Rio, but he does, and she for him it looks like. But when they're about to get married, Alvarado starts a fight and winds up dead, and Lowe goes to prison. Is Del Rio going back to her old ways?

There's a lot of talent behind this Joseph Schenck production for United Artists, with George Fitzmaurice directing, John Farrow and Carey Wilson having hands in the script, William Cameron Menzies designing the impressive sets, and Karl Struss in charge of the camera. Visually it's a treat, with Miss Del Rio dancing up a storm, but they could have used a better dialogue director than Earle Brown, because everyone starts out vocally overwrought and stays that way throughout. As a result, it's hard to take any of them seriously, especially with Lowe's on-again, off-again lower-class accent. The result is one of those films that showed that Hollywood was still trying to learn how to talk, and not succeeding.