Tag: Kay Francis

The End of the Affair: Cynara (1932)

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October 24, 2017

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Ronald Colman signed as a contract player with the Samuel Goldwyn Company in 1924, cranking out heart-tugging romances all the way through the transition to sound, as  in the 1932 production Cynara. A particularly “adult” pre-code drama, it frankly discusses extramarital affairs and suicide in a tone of disarming directness. Adapted from a hit play, Goldwyn wanted faithfulness to the material, though director King Vidor and writer Frances Marion sought ways to make this stagebound scenario more cinematic. The resulting film leads one to think that Goldwyn won most of the battles, as it is ends up as a very well-acted filmed play, though Vidor does find ways to be inventive at the edges. Ronald Colman, in his penultimate performance for Goldwyn, plays against type as a boring barrister who falls into an affair with a young shopgirl. He is no great lover, as he portrayed in a series of hit silents with Vilma Banky, but a nervous, guilt-ridden, self-flagellating one. Colman wasn’t happy with the film because it clashed with his established persona, but that is what makes the film so fascinating today.

Cynara originated in Robert Gore-Brown’s 1928 novel An Imperfect Lover, which was adapted into the play Cynara, a stage success in 1930. Goldwyn was in a perpetual search for quality material to funnel Colman into, wanting to build off of John Ford’s Arrowsmith (1931), which was nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars. The search lasted for months, and was so consuming that one evening, according to Harpo Marx, he visited the Goldwyn home to find their son Sammy reading the funny pages. Harpo asked what he was doing, and Sammy responded, “I’m looking for a Ronald Colman story, Mr. Marx.” With its suggestive subject matter and stage pedigree, Goldwyn eventually settled on Cynara as Colman’s next film, and lined up Vidor and Marion as his directing and writing time, fresh off of their triumph The Champ (1931). Marion agreed to do the job on one condition – that Goldwyn hire Lois Weber to assist in the adaptation. Weber, one of the pioneering female directors of the silent era, had fallen on hard times, and hadn’t worked on a film in five years, taking on a job as an apartment manager to make a living. Goldwyn agreed to the arrangement, both respecting Weber’s accomplishments and wanting Marion on the job.

Told in flashback as a confession from the misleadingly named barrister Jim Warlock (Ronald Colman) to his wife Clemency (Kay Francis), Cynara is an apologia for male infidelity. Jim is a homebody whose horny old bachelor pal John Tring (Henry Stephenson) is always encouraging to join him on extra-curricular outings. So when Clemency goes on an impromptu trip to Venice with her sister, Tring encourages Jim to explore the London nightlife, specifically its females. One night at an Italian restaurant, they run into two shopgirls named Doris (Phyllis Barry) and Milly (Viva Tattersall). Milly uses the flirtation as an excuse to enjoy Tring’s money, but Doris falls for Jim’s awkward sincerity, and concocts a plan to meet up with him again at a swimming exhibition that Jim would be judging. Jim tears up a note with Dori’s address, and in a beautiful transition, Vidor dissolves from the bits of torn-up note to pigeons flying in Venice, connecting Jim’s two loves in a poetic bit of montage. Despite his seemingly abiding love for Clemency, Jim begins a whirlwind affair with Doris, which ends just as abruptly when Clemency arrives home early. The whole affair ends in tragedy, threatening Jim’s marriage and the entire life he had built up until that point.

Though the film is centrally focused on Jim and Clemency’s marriage, it finds time to give the shopgirl’s perspective – showing how Doris doesn’t have the same societal protections as Jim’s upper class bubble. Milly repeatedly warns her about how working class girls are tossed away by men like Jim, but Doris refuses to hear it. She is in love, and pays the price. It is unclear how much influence Weber had on the script, but she dealt with the double-standard between married men and single women in the fallout of an affair in films like What Do Men Want? (1921) and Shoes (1916). That double standard definitely applies in Cynara, as while Jim’s reputation is tarnished, he is still free to make a new life wherever he’d like, while Doris is jobless and spiraling in depression.

The most thrilling scenes in the film occurs when Jim and Tring deign to visit the blue collar district – there is a remarkable sequence set inside a movie theater showing Chaplin’s A Dog’s Life (1918). Vidor has a camera boom swoop from the back of the theater down to the front, capturing the full-body laughter of a theater audience losing its mind to Chaplin. In a clumsy if effective visual metaphor, Chaplin shoves a dog down his pants to sneak into a dancehall, and the animal pokes through Chaplin’s pants, causing some awkward encounters. It is after this that Doris takes Jim’s hand in hers, and for the first time Jim exhibits what looks like lust. The sequence presents a Chaplin short as an erotic experience, both for the other revelers laughing their heads off in full body convulsions, and Jim and Doris, who find the film’s loosening of social codes a way to free themselves from their guilt, and towards their disastrous affair.

LOVE TRIANGLE: IT’S A DATE (1940)

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August 2, 2016

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“Film for film, William A. Seiter may have given more pleasure to more people than any other director of the classical Hollywood era.” – Dave Kehr, Film Comment

William A. Seiter made companionable films, ones populated with sly comic actors given room to work. He started directing silent short comedies in 1915 and ended working on the television sitcom The Gale Storm Show in 1960. In between he was a sensitive shaper of star personas, from the Dadaist antics of Wheeler and Woolsey through the stubborn independence of Ginger Rogers. Less known today are the four 1940s musical comedies he made with star Deanna “Winnipeg’s Sweetheart” Durbin, a cute Canadian teen with a legit soprano singing voice who became a sensation, and was the highest paid actress in Hollywood by 1947 (she retired the following year at age 26). Warner Archive released the first of these, It’s A Date (1940), on DVD last month, and it’s a divertingly funny love triangle, pitting mother (Kay Francis) and daughter (Durbin) against each other for a plum acting role as well as the love of Walter Pidgeon. The set-up is a frame for Seiter and cast to hang gags on, and the deep bench of character players includes Eugene Pallette, Samuel S. Hinds, and S.Z. Sakall.

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By the time Seiter joined the Deanna Durbin team, Universal had already hit upon a successful formula. Producer Joe Pasternak would select tales of problem-solving pluck that would provide excuses for Durbin to sing operatic solos. It’s a Date is no different, though it makes some concessions to her advancing age (she started  in features at 14, and was now 19), by introducing the possibility of love and marriage in the person of the much older Walter Pidgeon, though he eventually falls for Kay Francis to keep Durbin’s squeaky clean image intact.

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The screenplay, by Norman Krasna, has a tidy structure in which famed stage diva Georgia Drake (Francis) slowly cedes center stage to her irrepressible daughter Pamela. The fulcrum point is the casting of the new play by Carl Ober (S.Z. Sakall) to be directed by Sidney Simpson (Samuel S. Hinds). The theatrical duo initially offers the role to Georgia, but do an about face after seeing Pamela perform the lead part in a dress rehearsal. Pamela, without knowing her mother has already accepted the part, readily agrees to take it on as her first big break. She sails to see Georgia in Honolulu, and meets the prankster John Arlen (Walter Pidgeon) on board. Seeing her rehearse her lines of the romantic tragedy, he believes she is depressed, and tries to pull her out of it with some ingenious flirtation.

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Once  Pamela learns that she is replacing her mother in the play, she vows to quit the part without Georgia finding out. She is so disillusioned by the whole business she plans on marrying John and ditching stage life forever. But of course things don’t work out that way. John falls for Georgia, Georgia is intrigued but would rather not steal her daughter’s boyfriend, and Pamela goes to elaborate lengths to hide the secret about the role she is desperately trying to quit. It makes for effective farce, and the whole cast is game to keep the machinery moving. Seiter uses rhyming shots to keep the comparison between mother and daughter going. At an opening night party Pamela decides to make a grand entrance by waltzing in and laughing heartily, unbeknownst to her, Georgia is making a similar entrance across the room, and in a couture gown to boot (Francis is impeccably dressed throughout). Pamela is always getting upstaged, that is until Carl Ober sees her manic energy on display and decides she is perfect for his play. And Durbin is an effective motormouth, chewing off pages of dialogue with bright-eyed energy. I could do without her soprano solos, which are sung in extreme close-ups which grind the story to a halt, but it is one of those boxes a Durbin film had to tick.

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Hinds and Sakall act less like theatrical impresarios than indulgent uncles buying their precocious niece the prettiest toy in the store. Sakall is bubbly, Hinds is cool, but both coo at Durbin with undisguised adoration. The other man she entrances is John Arlen, a traveling playboy who falls for her idiosyncratic charms. He first sees her through a porthole, rehearsing her lines out the to balcony in the ocean. But he thinks the sad lines she is stating are real, so concocts a scheme to cheer her up. He pretends to be a stowaway, which immediately fires up Pamela’s imagination, and soon she is bribing the staff to bring him food and engineering plans to sneak him offshore (he’ll wear her clothes). This whole ship sequence is a series of gags with little impact on the plot, but it gives Seiter, Durbin and Pidgeon a lot to play with. Each character has an imbalance of information that makes them seem the fool. On the ship it’s Arlen, but once off of it Pamela goes in the dark, as the adult flirtation between him and Georgia flies above her head.

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All the clanking machinery comes together at a Governor’s Ball in Honolulu (the honking Eugene Pallette is the good-natured governor), in which Hinds and Sakall tumble in to break the casting news to Georgia, while John is going to propose to her. Pamela, meanwhile, is convinced John is going to propose to her. The stentorian Pidgeon is convincing as a ladies man  flustered for the first time. He sweats through his proposal with suavity while Durbin belts out “Musetta’s Street Song” from La Boheme. It’s well-orchestrated chaos overseen by Seiter and the Durbin star machine. Like most Seiter productions, it’s a warm, winning diversion in which the cast is having a ball and invites you in on the joke.

PASSING FASHION: KAY FRANCIS AT WARNER BROTHERS

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September 15, 2015

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In 1935 Kay Francis was one of the highest paid women in Hollywood, a glamorous star who set fashion trends based on the gowns Orry-Kelly designed for her. In 1939 Warner Brothers terminated her contract. This rapid fall from corporate favor is documented in three films the Warner Archive recently released on DVD:  I Found Stella Parish (’35), The White Angel (’36), and Confession (’37). All feature Francis as the suffering center, absorbing the sins of the world in sacrifice for the virtues of motherhood and mercy, expressed in extreme close-ups where Francis radiates a divine glow. Stella Parish and Confession are urban melodramas that offer Francis the opportunity for multiple hair and costume changes, one of the main pleasures of any Francis film, whereas The White Angel, a Florence Nightingale biopic, keeps her in heavy woolen nursing gear. It was the latter that disappointed Warners. It was perceived as a flop (though it actually turned a profit), and started the downshift in her career. None of these movies are masterpieces (see Trouble in Paradise for that), but contain the compensatory pleasures of any Francis film – gorgeous gowns, a dizzying array of haircuts, and a heart-tugging melodrama of female self-sacrifice.

I Found Stella Parish, directed by studio stalwart Mervyn Leroy (I Was a Fugitive on a Chain Gang) was such a success on its New York opening that WB extended Francis’ contract well before it was to expire. Based on a John Monk Saunders story called “The Judas Tree”, it is the story of London stage sensation Stella Parish (Francis), who disappears right after another smash hit debuts. A shadowy figure from her past appears in her dressing room, threatening to reveal a violent secret. In order to protect her daughter, Parish flees home to the US, and is trailed by a reporter, who reveals her past involvement in a murder case. Fashion is closely tied to identity. On the ship from London to the US,Francis hides her identity as a gray-haired granny in what looks like conservative mourning clothes. When she takes off the wig and returns to her natural age, reality sets in, the past still on her trail.

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Parish abandons her daughter to keep her free of scandal, and hits the stage to cash in on her newfound fame. Francis goes from grand dame lead in London to vaudeville circuit curiosity, her wardrobe getting tawdry, her language salty. There are no surprises in the film, but it hits its marks, and Francis is reliably stunning in Orrin-Kelly’s draping, backless gowns, and she positively glows with mother-love:

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The White Angel is something else entirely, a drab biopic of Florence Nightingale’s reformation of England’s nursing corps during WWI. Director William Dieterle, who had directed Francis before in the fast-paced screwball heist film Jewel Robbery (’32), seems bored with the material, as does most of the cast and crew, although there are a few nice tracking shots of Nightingale checking on wounded veterans, lit only by a lantern. But Francis wasn’t right for the role, and she knew it: “I shudder to think of that one”, she said in 1938:

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More importantly, the studio was displeased. Producer Hal Wallis:  “In scene after scene, reacting to the sight of the injured…she looked completely blank. We weren’t too happy with the picture. The White Angel was well directed, but miscast, and Kay Francis had lost the box office she once had. It was one of our box office failures.” Though he overstated the financial failure (it made $886,000 domestically on a $506,00 budget), the perception was something of a disaster. And once she lost that shine, she had trouble getting it back, not that WB was giving her great opportunities to succeed.

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Confession (1937) is the most fascinating film of the three (and the least successful at the box office), directed by German expat Joe May (Asphalt). The film was a remake of the Pola Negri movie Mazurka (1935), and reportedly May was militant about copying the film down to the second, showing up to the set with a stopwatch to make sure the shot length matched exactly. The movie has a complex flashback structure, delving into the past of Vera (Francis), as she is being tried for murder. A one-time actress in operettas for Michael Michailow (Basil Rathbone), she had later married, divorced, and lost her daughter in the split. Each phase of her life brings a different haircut and wardrobe, from the chin-length blonde locks of her court date, to a curly golden wig of her nightclub routine, back to her days as a happy-go-lucky brunette. Francis doesn’t even appear in the film for the first twenty minutes, a bold narrative strategy that focuses on secondary characters in elaborate tracking shot sequences, in and around a transit station, and then up and through a dinner theater. The lengthy prologue ends with Francis in a tacky patterned dress and wig, desperate to end that segment of her life. And so she does, with a gunshot to her male tormentor’s torso. The film has a strong sense of female solidarity, as Vera finds sympathy and tenderness from the second wife of her husband  and the estranged daughter who was the cause of it all. The intensity of that bond is terribly moving, and May’s roving camera and cluttered mise-en-scene provides a background of  a life in disarray. After the disappointing returns on The White Angel and Confession, WB started giving her cheaper projects, eventually shunting her off to their B unit, until they terminated her contract in 1939.

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ESSENTIAL PRE-CODE: JEWEL ROBBERY (1932)

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July 12, 2011

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Kay Francis dreamily asks for your complicit silence. She is about to commit an illicit act, and it would be gentlemanly not to speak of it.   So I shan’t, although I will spill fawning words about the film that encloses her, William Dieterle’s Jewel Robbery (1932). It is screening as part of Film Forum’s Essential Pre-Code series (and airs on TCM on occasion), a near annual festivity of tough-talking immorality that begins this Friday, July 15th. Released the same year as Ernst Lubitsch’s similarly themed Trouble in Paradise (and double-billed with it on August 7/8),  Dieterle’s debonair crime fantasy was necessarily overshadowed, but should be reckoned with as a major work in its own right.

A play by the Hungarian Ladislaus Fodor (“Ekzerrabalas a Vaci-uccaban”, 1931), was purchased by Warner Brothers on February 8th, 1932, with production beginning less than a month later, on March 2nd (credit to Roger Bryant’s biography, William Powell). To lens this sophisticated charmer set in Vienna, the studio tapped their European emigre, the German-born William Dieterle. Dieterle, a prolific actor and director in the Weimar cinema, came to Hollywood to shoot German language versions of WB productions. His first original film for the studio, the Lost Generation drama The Last Flight (1931, which I wrote about here), was a success, and he went on an incredibly creative run throughout the 1930s (I would also recommend 6 Hours To Live (1932) and The Devil in Love (1933)).

For the leads, he was gifted William Powell and Kay Francis. $100,000 of the $291,039 budget went to Powell, more than a third of the entire cost. Francis received a comparatively paltry $27,000 (reported by Bryant). Powell plays the unnamed “Robber”, a fastidiously well mannered thief. Francis would get a supporting role in Trouble in Paradise later in the year, but here she is the slinky, shallow and slightly bored housewife Baroness Terri. Stuck with the wealthy but gout-ridden Baron Franz (Henry Kolker), she dreams of escape. Her fantasies incarnate when Powell swoops in to the jewelry store to relieve her of the “Excelsior Diamond” which she was about to squeeze out of the Baron. Entranced by his swaggering, well-coiffed masculinity, the robbery turns into a battling flirtation. Powell, equally intrigued, starts a game of break-ins into the Baroness’ quarters, forcing her to make a choice between comfort and passion.

Dieterle instills a martial rhythm, matching the military precision in which Powell’s Robber executes his heists. He cuts when a screen is filled or an action performed – no lingering on atmosphere. During production, reports Bryant, Warner executive Darryl Zanuck showed concerned about this speedy style. On March 26th he wrote producer Lucien Hubbard to, “keep your eye very close on the rushes of Dieterle…as he has a habit of shooting his most important scenes with the camera moving or sweeping around or going back and forth and you miss the most important point of all.” Ever the diplomat, he sang a different tune to Dieterle, on April 5th: “The rushes continue to be very excellent, and I like the manner in which you are continuing to put movement and action in all the scenes … Keep this up. This is very fine.”

In a rapid opening montage, Dieterle shows a series of safe doors shutting and locking. With equal precision, a group of jewelry shop employees scuttle to line up diagonally across the frame. Dieterle repeats this line-up image in the next two sequences.  As soon as the last man enters the frame, he cuts to the pretentious owner bragging about the new security system. Of course, a few seconds later, he is robbed.

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The next lineup occurs in the Baroness’ home, as a who army of maids tromps down a grand staircase to minister to her needs. In the first scene, the line of men was protecting a diamond, in the second, the line is pampering Kay Francis. This jewel/Baroness metaphor continues when one of her helpers carries her into a massage chair to be buffed into beauty – a delicate object cleaned up to be presented to the world.

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Powell’s men form the third line-up, a dapper parade of black-suited shysters. And they are here not to protect, but to steal. As the Baron, Baroness and friends try to escape the store, a group of top-hatted criminals enter from the back, doff their caps in unison, and aim guns at chests. It is this shift in the line-up pattern that that then shifts the narrative. No longer coddled, Baroness Teri is shocked out of her comfort zone, and into one of romantic fantasy.

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Powell’s perfection has an air of unreality about it, a charming, un-threatening adventurer conjured out of Teri’s imagination. After he frisks a revolver out of a lovely pearl-inlaid box, he tells the stunned patrons, “Would you kindly put up your hands”. And then, to calm their troubled nerves, he gives them all some pot to smoke (a joint is later passed to the police department, who fully investigate its possibilities). The idea that this is just a beautiful dream of Teri’s continues when she is whisked away, or willingly kidnapped, to his ornate apartment getaway, which is filled with his ill-gotten gains. As they sit down for dinner, she asks him for his name, and he gently refuses. To admit to a name would pin down his identity, and snuff out the mystery which fuels her desire. He is anything she wants him to be. I don’t think I’ve seen a film that portrays female fantasy with such sensitivity.

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The other must-sees, or at least, the titles I’ve been most obsessed with recently, are three early stunners from Raoul Walsh:  Me and My Gal (1932), The Bowery (1933) and Sailor’s Luck (1933). 1932 was a good year. I wrote my first post here at Movie Morlocks on Me and My Gal, and lets see if it embarrasses:

Walsh shot the film in a scant nineteen days, and he doesn’t even mention it in his rakish autobiography, Each Man In His Time.

Perhaps it’s the speed of the schedule that led to its inventive, magpie spirit. Plenty of material needed to be created on the spot (there was obviously little pre-production time), and the film is flooded with ideas (some borrowed, some new) – ideas for pratfalls, camera movements, parodies. The movie contains direct addresses to the camera (by a tight J. Farrell MacDonald), self-reflexive voice-overs, and endless bits of comic business, from Will Stanton’s drunk act to the stinging bon mots flung from Bennett to Tracy.

A little sloppy, but not bad. The movie, as always, astounds. The Bowery is a more personal project for Walsh, revisiting the street that he used to rubberneck at as a curious upper-middle class kid in New York. In his autobiography he writes about how he cast real winos and bums to fill the backgrounds of his shots, in which he experiments with deep focus, a technique he would investigate the rest of his career. Then there’s Sailor’s Luck, which sets a giddy land-speed record for sexual innuendo and bumptious ethnic humor.