Classic Films in Focus: ROMANCE (1930)

Greta Garbo earned two Oscar nominations for Best Actress in 1930, one for Anna Christie (1930) and the other for Romance (1930). Both talking pictures and the Oscars were still new that year, and the double nomination testifies to the thrill viewers felt on hearing Garbo’s remarkable voice. In Romance, directed by Clarence Brown, Garbo uses that voice and all of her other charms to great effect, although the picture falls short of her best work because of trouble with the story and a weak performance from her leading man. Despite these issues, Romance is worth watching for its luminous star, who revels in the glamor and the tragedy of her character in truly operatic fashion.

Garbo plays European opera diva Rita Cavallini, who arrives in New York as the guest of her much older lover, Cornelius Van Tuyl (Lewis Stone). There she meets Tom Armstrong (Gavin Gordon), a young clergyman who becomes enamored of her and naively believes that they can be married. Van Tuyl encourages Rita to end the relationship in order to spare Tom the inevitable heartbreak of learning the truth about Rita’s past affairs, but Rita finds her own love for Tom too powerful to resist.

Rita is a perfect role for Garbo because it capitalizes on her persona as a foreign enchantress, an angel of the unknown, both gloriously bright and faintly threatening. Radiantly beautiful in her formal evening gown, Rita appears in her first important scene with Tom as a Sleeping Beauty awakened by his arrival in the room, but her pose is all a calculated role. Tom fails to recognize her, and she delights in his ignorance, even telling him that Madame Cavallini is a fat, ugly hunchback. The way she says “horrible” is thrillingly naughty, exaggerated and arch. Throughout the movie she is the flame to which moths and viewers are drawn, so we understand why both Van Tuyl and Tom fall in love with her, but it’s much harder to fathom what she sees in Tom, who comes off as priggish, stiff, and hopelessly out of touch. His prudish morality sounds especially dull coming from Gavin Gordon, who simply lacks any onscreen chemistry with his leading lady. We really believe he’d marry her and then expect her to be content crocheting doilies for the rectory and receiving the occasional chaste peck on the cheek as a mark of his affection.

The frame tale that surrounds the central narrative works very well, with the elderly Tom much more sympathetic and interesting than young Tom ever manages to be. Old Tom, a wiser and a sadder man, tells the story of his brief romance to his grandson, Harry (Elliott Nugent), a headstrong youth who wants to marry an actress against his mother’s wishes. We find out a lot about the aftermath of Tom and Rita’s brief time together in just a few lines of quiet dialogue. Of course Tom settles into a comfortable life with a woman more suited to his expectations and profession, but Rita’s story takes a different turn, surprising perhaps but perfectly in keeping with the grand theatrical nature of her passions. The last time we see her in Tom’s story, she is standing like a saint at the sacrificial stake, her rapt face turned toward God, with the forgotten and now worshipful Tom clinging to the hem of her gown. She seems poised for ascension; what earthly life could hold meaning for her after a moment like that?

Be sure to appreciate the appearance of Clara Blandick, best remembered as Auntie Em in The Wizard of Oz (1939), as Tom’s disapproving aunt. See more of the great Garbo in Grand Hotel (1932), Queen Christina (1933), and Ninotchka (1939). Gavin Gordon went on to play supporting roles in many films, including Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), The Scarlet Empress (1934), and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Lewis Stone played Judge Hardy in the Andy Hardy series, but you’ll also find him in other Garbo films and in Jean Harlow pictures like Red-Headed Woman (1932) and China Seas (1935). Clarence Brown earned an Oscar nomination for Best Director for his work on Romance; although he never won, he picked up five more nominations over the course of his career for films like A Free Soul (1931), National Velvet (1944), and The Yearling (1946).

Book Review: COMPLICATED WOMEN by Mick LaSalle

First published in 2001, Mick LaSalle's Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood is primarily a feminist consideration of Pre-Code actresses and the roles they were able to play before Joseph Breen threw a big, wet blanket on the Tinseltown party in 1934. Although it is probably not an ideal introduction to Pre-Code pictures for the absolute novice, Complicated Women is a very good resource for those who already know something about the era and its stars, and it's written in a casual, personal voice that will appeal to classic movie fans who aren't necessarily academic in their approach to pictures.

LaSalle, who reviews movies for the San Francisco Chronicle, focuses on the actresses who helped to define the distinctive themes and styles of the Pre-Code era. Starting with Norma Shearer and Greta Garbo, he works his way through discussions of Jean Harlow, Barbara Stanwyck, Kay Francis, Joan Crawford, Ann Harding, Joan Blondell, Ann Dvorak, Miriam Hopkins, and other leading ladies who rose to stardom during the early days of the talkies. LaSalle contrasts the kinds of pictures these women were making before 1934 with the melodramas that came into favor after the strict enforcement of the Hays Code, and he argues that Hollywood - and perhaps society as a whole - were forced to take a big step backwards in terms of women's liberties and sexual freedom because of the rabidly conservative forces that lined up behind Joseph Breen. In LaSalle's view, the Hays Code was primarily and vindictively concerned with screen images of women enjoying active sex lives, pursuing careers, and being perceived as morally complex individuals; the Code attempted to shut down these visions of gender equality and force women to see themselves in the old 19th-century roles as domestic angels or worldly temptresses, with the temptresses inevitably being punished for their sins.

The book reveals LaSalle's particular interest in Shearer and Garbo, to whom he devotes the lion's share of his attention. In contrast, he clearly has no love for Joan Crawford, whom he often describes in pejorative terms. While his discussions of Harlow, Stanwyck, and Blondell are intriguing, most readers will probably finish the book wishing there had been more pages dedicated to them. There's a reason Norma Shearer graces the cover of Complicated Women, and Shearer fans will be delighted to find LaSalle championing her cause most emphatically. LaSalle's treatment of the movies made in the later 1930s and 1940s might upset fans of that period, especially those who love the women's weepies, or melodramas, that made huge stars of Crawford and Bette Davis. LaSalle finds these pictures stifling in their reactionary images of women who must give up sexual freedom, economic independence, and even personal integrity in order to please the flawed men who expect so much from them. He observes that 1940s film noir escapes from the Code's strictures in its depictions of the femme fatale, who often conforms to the letter of the Code by getting killed for her iniquities but also impresses viewers with her strength and refusal to submit to conventional morality. Toward the end of the book, LaSalle speculates about more modern actresses as the heirs to Shearer and Garbo's legacies, but classic movie fans might find these segments the least compelling of the whole work, since they deal in actresses who might not even be familiar to those who haven't seen a lot of their films.

Reading the book in 2014, it's hard not to wonder what LaSalle thinks has changed since Complicated Women was first published. Pre-Code movies have become much easier to watch with the advent of streaming and specialized services and television channels. Has Shearer's reputation risen with the success of Turner Classic Movies and the arrival of Warner Archive and Warner Archive Instant? Have the movies finally caught up with Pre-Code visions of women's sexual and professional lives? While LaSalle did publish a follow-up, Dangerous Men: Pre-Code Hollywood and the Birth of the Modern Man, in 2002, he hasn't produced another book since then. Maybe it's time for him to provide readers with a new consideration of Pre-Codes that turns more of its attention to the other actresses who enjoyed their greatest success during that brief, wild fling before Breen and his cronies shut the party down.

Complicated Women is currently available in paperback on Amazon for just over $12. It would make a great Mother's Day gift for Norma Shearer devotees or fans of Pre-Code film.

Classic Films in Focus: GRAND HOTEL (1932)

Directed by Edmund Goulding, Grand Hotel (1932) is unique in the annals of Oscar history; it is the only Best Picture winner not even to be nominated for any other awards. Despite the Academy’s odd response to the film, Grand Hotel offers a lot more to the modern viewer than mere Oscar trivia. The ensemble cast includes many of classic Hollywood’s greatest names, and the microcosm of the hotel offers a fascinating study of the human condition as experienced by its guests.

The plot follows the overlapping stories of several guests at the Grand Hotel in Berlin, including an unhappy ballerina (Greta Garbo), an impoverished baron (John Barrymore), a dying middle-class worker (Lionel Barrymore), a desperate industrialist (Wallace Beery), and a pragmatic stenographer (Joan Crawford). In just a few nights, their lives are changed forever, even as life goes on within the hotel and beyond its walls.

Each character plays an important part in the overall story, and each is connected to the others in some way, although the entire cast never assembles in a single scene. This is probably for the best because it becomes almost impossible to know which actor to watch when three or more of them get together in a shot, particularly when the two Barrymore brothers simultaneously interact with both Joan Crawford and Wallace Beery. There’s a tremendous amount of scene-stealing going on, even from Lewis Stone as the jaded doctor who wanders in and out of the picture like a one-man Greek chorus.

Twists of fate abound, particularly where John Barrymore’s Baron and Beery’s General Director Preysing are concerned. Their actions propel them toward an encounter that is as tragic as it is inevitable. The Baron, a rake and a thief, rediscovers his own better nature in the arms of the dancer Grusinskaya (Garbo), while the Director’s pretense of morality rapidly collapses under the strain of a crucial business deal. The other characters are more or less caught between them and their changing fortunes. Doom hangs over them all, and the ending only partly alleviates our sense of it. The wheel turns, and all are carried with it, a point underscored even by the porter (Jean Hersholt) awaiting the birth of his child.

Edmund Goulding also directed The Dawn Patrol (1938), Dark Victory (1939), and The Razor’s Edge (1946). See more of John Barrymore in Dinner at Eight (1933), Twentieth Century (1934), and the hilarious Midnight (1939). Brother Lionel is best remembered today as Mr. Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), but he played much more sympathetic characters in A Family Affair (1937), Captains Courageous (1937), and You Can’t Take It with You (1938). See Joan Crawford’s Oscar-winning performance in Mildred Pierce (1945) and Garbo’s great comedic role in Ninotchka (1939) for more of those iconic leading ladies. Wallace Beery tied Fredric March for Best Actor for his performance in The Champ (1931), but you can also find him playing Long John Silver in the 1934 adaptation of Treasure Island.