The Entertainer

by Margaret Talbot

  By the mid-1930s these movies were out, and screwball comedies in which women were still funny and mischievous but mostly with their male romantic interests, and mostly in domestic settings, eclipsed the female buddy picture. By contrast, as Karnick argues, the female buddy pictures showed women out in the world, women as adventuresses, plucky and piratical. And unlike later women’s pictures, in which the beautiful but unfunny lead has a funny but far less glamorous sidekick (often a maid, sometimes a friend), in these movies the two women were equally attractive and equally wisecracking, and occupied equal time on screen.

  During the pre-Code era it was easier than it would be for a long time afterward to make movies in which fallen women were not roundly punished for their sins. In Blonde Venus, Marlene Dietrich becomes a hot nightclub entertainer, the mistress of Cary Grant, and ultimately a prostitute, but ends up happily reunited with her husband (whose medical treatment her labors paid for) and their little son. In Red-Headed Woman, the gleefully home-wrecking Jean Harlow ends up having her cake and eating it, too—married to a wealthy old marquis in Paris, while playing around with his handsome young chauffeur. Sure, the women in these films endure their humiliations and setbacks, but they end up very far from the gutter.

  Several of my father’s films from the period offer interesting twists on the theme of feminine punishment and redemption. Ladies They Talk About is an odd little film in which plausibility and motivation take it on the chin. But it has its piquant, pre-Code moments. Barbara Stanwyck plays Nan Taylor, a bank robber in a gang of guys led by Lyle, looking unusually buff. Though he made only two movies with her, and neither of them was particularly good, Barbara Stanwyck was my father’s favorite actress to work with. She was such a professional, he said, always came to the set prepared, always knew her lines, never made a fuss about it. Like those good sports Carole Lombard and Marion Davies, she was also a star who had an easy rapport with everyone on set, including the crew, whose wives and kids’ names she always remembered.

  Many of the great Hollywood actresses of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s came from lower-class origins, but Stanwyck’s background was striking for its sketchiness and rock-bottom struggles. The roles she played in the early ’30s weren’t so far from the life she’d led in the early ’20s, when, as she once recalled, she “just wanted to survive, and eat, and have a nice coat.” Stanwyck had been born Ruby Stevens in Brooklyn in 1907, the fifth child of a frequently unemployed laborer and his wife. When she was two years old, her mother, while pregnant again, was killed by a drunken stranger who knocked her off a streetcar. Stanwyck’s father ran away to Panama to work on the canal, and she never saw him again. She was raised in foster homes, from which she was constantly running away. As a teenager, Stanwyck got by on her own, taking jobs as a typist, a pattern cutter, a chorus girl on the midnight-to-seven-a.m. shift, and a taxi dancer at a speakeasy, before being discovered on the New York stage as the gifted actress she was. Though she was a beauty, with a lithe, graceful body, a perfectly straight nose, and glimmering eyes, she was not a creamy, luscious type. She seemed to be built for quick escapes and tight corners. Her face was delicate and shrewd, and her acting suggested an incisive native intelligence. She could summon a bitterness and a hysteria that contorted her features and made her look almost ugly. But she was also uncommonly deft at revealing the surprising softness inside a character’s brittle shell, and that was what made her great. As the critic Wendy Lesser notes, Stanwyck’s characters did not seem as though they were helplessly surrendering up their vulnerability: they seemed to be making a courageous choice to let it show.

  In Ladies They Talk About, the most memorable scenes take place in prison. After participating in a bank heist, Nan almost evades a prison sentence when the crusading district attorney, David Slade (Preston Foster), takes a shine to her. Ladies They Talk About was based on a play by the actress Dorothy Mackaye, who had herself spent two years in San Quentin for concealing evidence in the beating death of her husband (her lover, a young actor she later married, had done the beating). It wouldn’t be quite right to say that Mackaye’s firsthand experience of prison life made for a realistic movie. The prison in Ladies They Talk About looks an awful lot like a girl’s dormitory at a rather nice boarding school, and the inmates seem to have plenty of silky undergarments and frilly bedclothes. This is a movie too focused on showing what its audiences could be presumed to want—titillating glimpses of women behind bars plus the wish-fulfilling spectacle of a woman who’d made a mess of her life, enjoying the adoration of a good and good-looking man—to bother much with plausible plot development, let alone realistic portrayals of institutions. Still, the inmates’ maneuverings around one another, the shabby specificity of their alliances and fights, are sharply rendered.

  Prison pictures, like war pictures, offer a studiously diverse cast—high and low, black and white, Jewish and Gentile thrown into unaccustomed proximity—and this movie is no different. Because it’s pre-Code, however, the different types and their attributes are coarser and more unabashed than we expect from old movies. There’s a disputatious black inmate named Mustard who holds her own against a society dowager in for poisoning her husband; there’s a mannish, cigar-smoking woman in a bow tie and short slicked-back hair (“Watch out for her,” Nan’s friend warns her. “She likes to wrestle”); there’s Aunt Maggie, a blowzy, bawdy madam who’s a “grand old soul,” according to Nan’s friend; and there’s a David Slade–following religious fanatic named Sister Susie. (She tells Nan there’s no punishment too harsh for her, a threat that elicits my favorite riposte in the movie: “Yeah? Well, being penned up here with a daffodil like you comes awful close.”)

  While at San Quentin, Nan tries to help her friends, my father’s character, the suave con Don, and his partner, Dutch, escape from the men’s prison next door. When the plot is foiled and the men are killed, she blames David Slade, the D.A., and after her release shoots him. She only wings him, he forgives her, and—sure, why not?—asks her to marry him. Ladies They Talk About inverts one common formula: rather than the love of a good woman saving an errant man, it’s the other way around. Yet Nan, unlike many a reformed man in the movies, does no swearing to go straight, and other than a perfunctory “I didn’t mean to do that” to Slade for shooting him, no real apologizing. The only impassioned speech she delivers is about the grisly fate of the guys from her old criminal gang: “And the two kids they got! Their brains are in alcohol in little jars for curious visitors to gape at, property of the state!” If we like her, it’s because, as she says more than once, she’s no stoolie; she stays loyal to her friends, bad’uns though they are. Unlike Sister Susie, she’s no true believer, either—just a practical-minded survivor.

  Heat Lightning, another of my father’s pre-Code women’s pictures, this one directed by the capable Mervyn LeRoy, is a better movie, though, morally speaking, more twisted. Aline MacMahon and Ann Dvorak play sisters who run a roadside gas station and diner in the desert. The actresses are convincing as sisters—both tall and dark, with long faces and a tendency to smudginess under the eyes, though Dvorak is gorgeous and MacMahon more interesting-looking. The sister MacMahon plays, Olga, is older and dresses like a man, in coveralls, with a bandanna concealing her hair. She’s also the mechanic around the place and gratifyingly competent at her job. Dvorak’s Myra is younger, dreamier, and more restless; she’s the waitress in the diner but longs for nights out on the town with Steve, a man whom Olga thinks is a bad egg.

  Their lives are turned inside out when one hot day—they’re all hot days out there—a couple of bank robbers on the lam walk into the diner, squinting from the glare of the desert sun. Preston Foster plays the hard case, George, and my father plays the weaker partner in crime, Jeff, a guy whose queasy combination of conscience and fear of the hot seat are making him as jumpy as a cat. When Jeff says to his partner, “Yeah, you did the shootin’, and I’ve been regrettin’ it ever since,” George replies:
“Those boys were born to be drilled at two o’clock Tuesday and that’s when they got it.” Heat Lightning ends up with a shooting by a woman, too—this one fatal but also unpunished.

  It’s a fun movie to watch now, in part because of its sense of place—my father remembered shooting it on location in the Mojave Desert, the rare Warner Brothers film made outside a soundstage in those years. It has a fine sense of atmosphere: the Joshua trees and flashes of eponymous heat lightning on the horizon; the diner, with its slamming screen door, checkered tablecloths, and bottled soda pop; the Mexican family whom Olga lets camp out on the property singing boleros in the velvety darkness. And the supporting cast offers up a matter-of-fact pre-Code tawdriness—portraits with an acid tang to them. The divorcees, played with caustic high spirits by Glenda Farrell and Ruth Donnelly, are warm for the form of their nebbishy chauffeur (“I told them I got a wife in Flatbush,” he protests feebly to Olga, “but that only seemed to encourage ’em”), and one of them ends up spending the night with him. A respectable-looking geezer stops by the gas station with two hard-faced, hitchhiking hotties in tow on their way to Hollywood. He calls them his nieces, and everybody had a laugh about that. “It’s your turn to sit up in the front with that old thigh-pincher,” one tells the other as they leave the diner. “You go your way,” the other one calls out to George and Jeff, “and we’ll go the way of all flesh.”

  Heat Lightning was released in the spring of 1934, so it just snuck in under the last months of the looser Code enforcement regime. The Studio Relations Committee had won a few concessions—when George leaves the cabin where he’s disappeared with Olga, he’s fully clothed, for instance. But plenty that the committee had suggested should be expurgated remained in Heat Lightning—phrases evoking the geezer’s lechery, references to Myra’s night with her boyfriend and to Olga’s affair with George, an obvious search for the bathroom when the two hotties arrive—and as a result, the film could not be reissued after Code enforcement began in earnest.

  Despite its amusing touches, though, Heat Lightning is actually kind of a bleak movie—especially when it comes to limning women’s prospects. Olga initially looks like a strong character, and in a way she is. She’s good at her job—a man’s job—and she’s brisk and no-nonsense. But ultimately, she’s someone who is so vulnerable to the dubious charms of a seductive loser that she’s had to isolate herself in the desert and renounce sexuality altogether. It might have been a last resort that some women in the audience could relate to, but it’s still a last resort.

  By contrast, one of the pre-Code women’s films my father did surprised me with its portrayal of a warmly sexual and loving woman who excels at a man’s profession. This was Mary Stevens, M.D. (1933), a Warner Brothers quickie to be sure, with the slight attention to character development you’d expect but with a vein of real feeling nonetheless. Kay Francis and my father play newly minted doctors who go into practice together. Mary Stevens (Francis) has to deal with naysayers, but she is a calm, resourceful type, and has the support of her pal and nurse, Glenda, played by Glenda Farrell, and—after his fashion—her colleague Don, played by my father. “You said a woman couldn’t do it,” Mary tells Don on their graduation day from medical school. “A woman couldn’t,” he replies. “But you! You’re a superwoman.” Don believes in her as a doctor but—cliché alert—can’t see her as a desirable woman and marries a blond society girl (Thelma Todd) before coming to his senses. (Absurd, of course, since the audience can see from the get-go that Francis is a tall, shapely stunner with wide-set gray eyes and luxuriant blue-black hair.) My father liked Francis; they called each other “cuz,” and he thought her lisp was cute. They were never lovers, though both got around, but their chemistry works pretty well here—not so much in the laughable scenes where they’re doing something vaguely medical but in the private moments when he shows her a tender sympathy. He could play tender—his natural sweetness and affection for women shone through in those moments.

  Lyle had several roles like this: the playboy doctor with a drinking problem. It was kind of a stock character at the time. Why, I wonder. Surely there weren’t that many doctors pounding back hip flasks full of hooch between patients, even in an era when it was easier for doctors to shield themselves from oversight. Maybe the rich and reckless doctor unleashed on powerless charity cases made a suitably disturbing metaphor for all the authority figures—from bank presidents to the president of the United States—who had let Americans down in the early 1930s. When Mary tells Don she’s disgusted with him, it’s a relief for the audience.

  Later in the film, when the admirable Mary realizes she’s pregnant by Don, she makes the decision to have the baby on her own. “Take a good grip on that desk, plant your feet firmly, and prepare for the shock of your life,” she tells her friend and nurse, Glenda. “I’m going to have a baby. . . . What’s so funny about it? I didn’t invent the idea. Women have been having babies for a long while.” Glenda asks, “It is Don’s?” (“Of course, you goose,” Mary replies) and asks her whether she’s happy. “Walking on air,” Mary tells her. “Well then, darling,” says Glenda. “So am I.” As the film critic Mick LaSalle notes, “It would be a long time before such a reasonable exchange between single ladies would again be possible in American film.”

  There are a couple of striking things about the portrayal of women in Mary Stevens, M.D. One is that Mary sticks with her career. The last scene shows her in her new offices, practicing medicine with Don as a partner (and husband; Glenda opens the door to reveal the couple in a clinch). True, she has not emerged unscathed; her baby has died and her grief has been exposed, movingly. But there’s no reason to think that Don and Mary won’t have more children together. Don not only loves her but exalts her career: “Your work is important,” he tells her. “Hundreds, thousands of children need your skill, your knowledge.” As LaSalle notes, “The movie ends up with an affirmation of her both as a woman and a professional.” That would be, for many years to come, an unusual affirmation indeed. Women doctors (and lawyers and other professionals) were comparatively sparse in films—as they were in real life—for most of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. And when they did turn up, they often renounced their careers in the last frames to please their new husbands, as Margaret Lindsay did in The Law in Her Hands (1936) and Ann Harding, playing a psychiatrist, did in The Flame Within (1935).

  The other striking aspect of the picture, though, involves Mary and her baby. It’s not just that she is comfortable with having a baby as a single mother. It’s also that her interactions with him show the sensual delight that mothers take in their babies, something that is not all that commonly portrayed in movies even now. She lies down on the floor with her baby, brings her face playfully close to his, nibbles on his chubby, bare foot. She seems natural, relaxed, and besotted. It makes the scene when he dies all the more wrenching. The movie manages to convey this sensibility against the will of a censorship regime that was weirdly squeamish about babies. James Wingate, of the Studio Relations Committee, came down unusually hard on this aspect of Mary Stevens, M.D.: “From the standpoint of censorship generally, we would recommend that you consider trimming very considerably the various discussions about babies and their expected arrival,” he wrote in a letter to Jack Warner. “As you know, the question of pregnancy and childbirth is a touchy one with many censor boards and a large part of the public.”

  You can understand why the movie censors and conventional opinion might be nervous about depictions of illegitimate births and pregnancies, but often it was birth and pregnancy in general that they were chary of. The Pennsylvania censorship board, for instance, didn’t even allow baby clothes or diapers to be shown in movies. It was as though any references to how children actually came into the world and what they might need and do in the first early months were in themselves distasteful. Knowing the attitudes this cut-rate little picture was defying made me like it more and want to defend it from the prissy New York Ti
mes review that ran when it came out (Kay Francis is “a woman physician who has a startling amount of trouble preserving a professional detachment toward the primitive emotions”) and from the oblivion it was consigned to when the Breen office denied its re-release.

  Many pre-Code movies do not end as the authors of the Code wanted, and as American movies almost always did from 1934 till the mid-1960s: with virtue rewarded and vice punished. Sometimes, in the pre-Code era, this made for endings that were bleak and deeply effective—endings like that of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, which refuses to find a happy resolution for its hunted hero, a victim of the judicial system and of the Depression. Sometimes, it made for endings that are refreshing because, as in Mary Stevens, M.D., they do not chastise their sexually unconventional heroines. And sometimes the endings are just strange. The resolution of Love Is a Racket, the first film my father made in Hollywood, has a handsome young newspaper columnist—the movie’s hero or at least its main character—covering up a murder committed by his girlfriend’s dowager aunt. He’s trying to protect the girlfriend, who’s a heartless little minx, and he succeeds, getting off scot-free and apparently guilt-free as well.

  In College Coach, a gleefully venal college football coach named James Gore (Pat O’Brien) not only hires ringers to play for him, and fixes their grades so they can remain eligible for the team, but instructs them at one point to play so rough that they end up mortally injuring a boy on the opposing team. (He also finagles a dirty real estate deal.) At the end of this blusteringly cynical William Wellman film, though, the coach is still a rich, successful, happily married man who neither suffers nor repents. His beautiful wife (Ann Dvorak) resents all the time he spends at work but apparently has no objection to his complete absence of principles. As the movie reviewer Glenn Erickson writes, “The fascinating thing about ‘College Coach’ is that Gore isn’t a villain, but a guy who knows the score and plays the cards as he sees them. . . . A film produced under the Code would likely insist that ‘cheaters never prosper.’” This one does not.