Charming Sinners

"Charming Sinners" may be ancient in age (and the sound is often problematic, making some of the dialogue hard to hear) but it's quite modern and sophisticated in its attitudes towards marital infidelity and gender equality. Thematically, it's rather similar to Norma Shearer's "The Divorcee", which it precedes by a year. Not funny enough to be a comedy, and not dramatic enough to be a drama, but it does feature some very good acting - Ruth Chatterton is simply splendid (especially when she smiles), the little-known Mary Nolan is cute, and William Powell has a small, typically suave role. **1/2 out of 4.

The whole cast is wonderful. Many people today can't relate to stars like Ruth Chatterton and Clive Brook. To me, Chatterton was a great actress. Her speaking voice was beautiful and she conveyed great and subtle emotion with her face. Brook seems stiff to some people. To me, he was handsome, he spoke his lines clearly and he had a perfect posture, so I can't find any fault with this fine actor.

Mary Nolan, William Powell and Laura Hope Crews are all good in the supporting roles.

Clive Brook is married to Ruth Chatterton. He is carrying on an affair with Mary Nolan. She's married to Montagu Love, as well as being Miss Chatterton's best friend. The adulterers think they've got everyone fooled. But Miss Chatterton knows, and helps cover up for her husband when Love finds out. But she's not done with him.

It's the first sound version of Somerset Maugham's The Constant Wife, and it's played as one of those farces from a couple of decades earlier. Which is what it was. Brook, as usual, plays a stuffy stiff, while Miss Nolan is pretty and affects a French accent for some reason -- possibly to cover up her line readings, which rarely impress me in her talkies. Love is good, and so is William Powell, as a former suitor. But Miss Chatterton is excellent, playing the role as forthright and finding the evolving situation so amusing that she can''t keep a straight face.

As a movie it's not great. Victor Milner's camerawork is struck still, leaving the editing by Verna Willis to carry the burden. Which it doesn't really. Also, the copy I looked at was rather poor in the visuals, and hissy in the audio track. It required a good deal of patience to watch. In the end, though, Miss Chatterton made it worthwhile.

Despite their occasional creakiness, I'm a great fan of the early talkies. This one, however, is not only creaky but downright inept in every department, save one -- acting. In the acting division, thanks to the sterling efforts of Mary Nolan, Montagu Love and William Powell (in a very small, if important role), it's only 90% rotten. Clive Brook gives such a bad performance, one contemporary reviewer assumed he was playing the butler and wrote a tongue-in-cheek critique accordingly. Sad to say that while Brook plumbs the depths of ineptitude, Miss Chatterton and Miss Crews do not exactly shine either, although it's tempting to blame their staginess on the extremely static yet over-emphatic direction they obviously received from Robert Milton. As a result, the Somerset Maugham comedy-of-manners comes across with all the wit of a turkey's egg. Sparse production values and hole-in-the-wall photography don't help either.

Watch it for the clothes and the manners. It is a comedy of manners, and the sets are delicious. Before the Crash... Hollywood recycles 1926 hit play by Somerset Maugham, THE CONSTANT WIFE. Watch out, these people are still basically Edwardians. Americans "set in London" except Clive Brook, veddy English. An incredibly stiff young William Powell, a serviceable dandy. And Ruth Chatterton in the role of the wronged wife who's wise enough to use guerilla tactics. Laura Hope Crews as her Mother is a fascinating relic of a distant age.

Not for the faint of heart who must see a car explode every 5 minues. The tensions here are emotional and erotic, something Americans have mostly had beaten out of them.