Hollywood Madonna

by Bernard F. Dick

  They Call it Sin was an apologia for patriarchy. If Manners had not interfered, the relationship would have unraveled by itself, ending with the producer’s disenchantment with Marion, whose overriding ambition was to succeed as a composer. But the film works from the assumption that man knows best, and woman is Adam’s rib. Patriarchy triumphs. Only a male can save the day, even though Marion is willing to lie for Manners and tell the police that she caused the accident. Marion doesn’t have to. The producer briefly regains consciousness and exonerates Manners before dying. And what about Marion and the doctor, who loves her? After they’re married, he may even allow her to continue composing or go back to being a church organist.

  The sadly neglected Life Begins (1932) was a true woman’s film. Unfortunately, it has been virtually ignored because few film historians know of it or have seen it. Originally entitled “Woman’s Day,” it was a tribute to Warner’s refusal to compromise on a script that was never meant for a happy ending. Grace Sutton (Loretta) is married, pregnant, and a murderer. The circumstances of the crime are deliberately vague; apparently, Grace shot a corrupt politician who was trying to frame her. Loretta’s two-piece wardrobe consisted of a drab cloth coat and a floppy hat, replaced with a euphemistically named “hospital gown” after she is admitted to the maternity ward. The ward represents a cross section of women on the eve of delivery: the maternal type, eager to share her experiences and offer words of hope; a show girl (flamboyantly played by Glenda Farrell), who has given birth to twins, intending to put them up for adoption until her motherly instincts get the better of her; an Italian woman who lost her child (and may get one of the twins); and then Grace, forced to decide between abortion and C-section, which would save her child at the expense of her life. She chooses the latter.

  Earl Baldwin’s script is ingeniously plotted, with enough hints to suggest that Grace could get a suspended sentence and justice would prevail. But he wisely chose a different route—the one to which the film was inexorably heading. Life Begins did not cater to audiences hoping for an ending in which mother and child survived. But when a nurse folds up Grace’s shawl and removes the chart from her bed—to free it for the next patient—we know what has happened. Wisely, Loretta was given a role in which she could look simultaneously like an angel slumming on earth and a mortal on her way to eternity. Again, it was astonishing that, at nineteen, Loretta could display such a range of emotion. Although she is fearful, she conceals her anxiety from her husband; she is compassionate toward a mental patient who wanders into the maternity ward looking for her “child”; finally, she resigns herself to dying so that life can begin. The final shot is of the title, Life Begins, superimposed over Loretta’s serene face, implying that she has made the right decision: Life will continue, if not hers, then her daughter’s. And from the way her husband cradles the infant in his arms, he believes this, too. Variety (30 August 1932) commended Loretta on her convincing performance, noting that she succeeded admirably despite the restrictions of wardrobe and setting. The “must see” reviews did not convince the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: Life Begins did not receive a single Oscar nomination. But Loretta, now about to turn twenty, had no time to fret. There were more movies to make.

  In 1933, she appeared in nine films, one of which was The Life of Jimmy Dolan, a tightly constructed melodrama about the boxing world, vividly brought to life by director Archie Mayo. The film was the forerunner of such classics of the ring as Body and Soul (1946), The Set-Up (1949), and Champion (1949). But it was not the Raging Bull of 1933. Loretta was cast as Peggy, the generic virgin, with lightened hair and homespun clothes. But it was not her film; in fact she does not appear for the first third of it. Again Loretta was paired with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., appearing as the title character. Jimmy Dolan is a prizefighter, who flees a crime scene after accidentally killing a reporter. Dolan goes on the lam, changes his name, rides the rails to Salt Lake City, and ends up at a farm run by Peggy and her aunt (Aline MacMahon, with a respectable Scottish burr), where the two women educate orphans with polio. When niece and aunt cannot meet their mortgage payment, Dolan returns to the ring, and while he doesn’t defeat his opponent, he lasts long enough to get the mortgage money. A detective (Guy Kibbee, giving the best performance in the film), in disgrace for having sent the wrong man to the electric chair, attempts to redeem himself by locating Dolan. Just when it seems that Dolan will have to stand trial, the detective turns deliverer. Only the benign Kibbee could perform such a magnanimous gesture. Thus the film does not end, as it should, with Dolan getting a reduced sentence and Peggy agreeing to wait for him until he walks through the prison gates.

  The role took little out of Loretta; it was just another movie, this time requiring her to get down and dirty as a farm girl. If Jimmy Dolan is remembered, it is not for Loretta, but for the brief appearance of John Wayne, as a visibly nervous boxer counting on the prize money for his family. In his few minutes of screen time, Wayne revealed a vulnerability that he rarely had a chance to exhibit. This was not the first time that Wayne appeared in a film with Loretta. In Three Girls Lost (1931), in which Loretta was one of a trio hoping to make it big in Chicago, Wayne played a minor role. The Los Angeles Times review (15 June 1931) complimented him on his “nice voice,” but noted that he “still needs a few lessons in acting.” Fortunately, Wayne never took the review to heart. Once he and John Ford teamed up, his image was carved in celluloid, Hollywood’s equivalent of Mount Rushmore. For a time, Loretta and John Wayne, strangely enough, were friendly—or as friendly as she could be with someone with whom she had little in common. The sole connection was his first wife, Josephine Saenz, a friend of Loretta’s and a devout Catholic. Since Wayne was not a Catholic, Loretta arranged for the couple to be married at her home on 24 June 1933. A decade later they divorced, Saenz charging “extreme cruelty.” Loretta and Saenz remained close, but she never worked again with Wayne.

  For Loretta it was back to work, costarring with two actors who revolutionized the crime film, Edward G. Robinson (Little Caesar [1930]) and James Cagney (The Public Enemy [1931]), and another familiar to moviegoers but not in Robinson or Cagney’s league, Warren William. Although Robinson and Cagney could play more than upwardly mobile gangsters, they had few opportunities to demonstrate their versatility. Robinson displayed an amazing flair for comedy in The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse (1938) and Larceny, Inc (1942), but audiences preferred Robinson the heavy. Cagney fared better. He was a superb dancer (e.g., Taxi!, Footlight Parade, Something to Shout About, and, above all, Yankee Doodle Dandy, for which he won his only Oscar). He could also exude an air of menace that can still make a viewer uncomfortable. In Taxi! (1932), which dramatized the wars waged by a combine against independent taxi drivers who refused to give up their stations, Cagney played a hot-headed cabbie, who would haul off at anyone who looked at him the wrong way. Then cockiness turned to petulance, as the actor’s eyes registered a maniacal glee. But he is not the only one with a short fuse. The usually benign Guy Kibbee was cast as an independent driver, whose refusal to relocate results in the loss of his cab when the combine arranges for a truck to crash into it. Enraged, Kibbee shoots the driver and ends up in prison, where he dies.

  Although Kibbee’s waitress-daughter (Loretta) knows about Cagney’s temper, she still marries him. When he is physically abusive, she stands by her man. Taxi!, which began on a note of authenticity, degenerates into jaw-dropping disbelief when the mistress of the man responsible for the “accident” that ruined Loretta’s father begs her for $100, so she and her lover can leave the country! That she would even make such a request is either unalloyed arrogance or a plot device to suggest that the daughter is a pushover. Initially taken aback, Loretta consents. It’s as if she has encountered her mirror image: another woman who, faced with the “love him or leave him” dilemma, chooses the former, as she did herself. The lovers never manage to leave the country. The police arrive, the villain plunges to his death from an open window, and the
scales of justice are temporarily balanced, although there is no indication that Cagney has learned to curb his temper—and audiences preferred it that way.

  We tend to remember Taxi! not for the scenes in which Cagney loses his cool (his behavior is just irksome), but for two others: one in which Cagney s converses with a Yiddish-speaking man in Yiddish; and another, in which the winners of a dance contest are not Cagney and Loretta, who dance like professionals, but the unbilled George Raft and his partner. Both actors were experienced dancers—Raft, sleek and reptilian; Cagney, scrappy and streetwise. But Loretta’s performance should not be overlooked. When she had to play a woman of the working class, without a fancy wardrobe and elaborate makeup, she looked and sounded blue collar. The script required her to resolve all the tensions within her character, which was not easy, especially the scene with the mistress. Loretta’s sacrificial gesture would have struck audiences as implausible, perhaps even eliciting groans without the right blend of innocence and compassion. That Loretta could combine these emotions in the right proportions is a tribute to her art, which would have been more evident if she had been given better roles. But such was the studio system—particularly Warner’s with its assembly line approach to production.

  Taxi! and The Hatchet Man (1932) were not Loretta’s only films with James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson. By the time Warner Bros. had the actors working both sides of the law, Loretta was no longer at the studio. The Hatchet Man was not vintage Robinson or Loretta. William Wellman, the director, does not mention it in his autobiography, A Short Time for Insanity; Robinson dismisses it in his, All My Yesterdays; and Loretta never seems to have expressed an opinion. The Hatchet Man may have some historical significance. The David Belasco and Abdullah Amet play that inspired it was a re-creation of the Tong Wars that erupted in various Chinatowns—especially those in San Francisco and Los Angeles—and lasted from the mid 1800s to the 1920s. The tongs were originally secret societies, more like protective agencies than clans, created to protect Chinese immigrants from discrimination and violence. Gradually, they turned into mafia-like organizations with a similar hierarchies and codes of honor. When a tong member was murdered, a hatchet man—the hereditary title for an avenger—would dispatch the victim with a hatchet.

  Robinson played the title character. Although he was a graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, he was not perceived as a “serious” actor and, in fact, was never nominated for an Oscar. Yet in The Hatchet Man, he was authentically Chinese in speech and manner. He is assigned to kill a boyhood friend (J. Carrol Naish), who accepts his fate resignedly. (Nash moved and spoke with ritualized staginess, which may have been his or Wellman’s idea of the way ethnic Chinese act when faced with death.) But first, Naish has Robinson swear that he will marry his daughter when she comes of age. The daughter is Loretta, unrecognizable in her first scene, in which she appears more metallic than human. Her face looks lacquered rather than made up, resembling a mask with slits for her eerily slanted eyes. Her relationship with Robinson’s character is a May-December marriage, which comes apart when Loretta takes a younger lover. The ignominy that her adultery brings on the tong results in Robinson’s expulsion and the loss of his business. Meanwhile, the lover turns drug dealer and pimp, whisking Loretta off to China, where she is sold into prostitution. If this turn of the plot seems deliberately sensational, it is historically accurate. The more criminal tongs were drug traffickers and white slavers.

  Robinson works his way to China, rescues Loretta, and hurls his hatchet at the wall—the blade landing in the back of the drug-dealing pimp standing behind it. Although The Hatchet Man has some historical value in its depiction of the Tong Wars, it is more indicative of Hollywood’s indifference to ethnicity and race in the 1930s. Using white actors, however talented, to impersonate Chinese immigrants or even Chinese-Americans reflects the industry’s reluctance to groom non-whites for roles requiring ethnic and racial authenticity. That would eventually change, but not for the next three decades. The Hatchet Man was Loretta’s first, but not her last, ethnic role: On her television series, The Loretta Young Show, she portrayed an Asian woman again in “The Pearl” (1956).

  Loretta’s situation in the 1930s was commonplace: The female lead either outshines the male, or vice versa. In Employees’ Entrance, it was the latter. Warren William was a competent “B” movie star, best known as Warner’s Perry Mason in the 1930s and Columbia’s Lone Wolf in the 1940s. As Kurt Anderson, a tyrannical department store manager, William was indisputably the star of Employees’ Entrance (1933). His Anderson is so satanic that his victims are more pitiable than tragic. The homeless Madeleine (Loretta) takes refuge in the furniture section of the store, where she plans to spend the night in the model parlor. When the predatory Anderson discovers her, she flirts, he is aroused, a dinner invitation follows, and Madeleine is expected to show her gratitude by not resisting when Anderson backs her against a door. A slow fade out indicates that Anderson has made another conquest.

  Anderson gets Madeleine a job as a model, which gives Loretta the opportunity to appear in a pre-code bridal gown with an exposed back. Madeleine marries another employee (Wallace Ford), whom Anderson is grooming as his assistant. For Anderson, sex has two functions, neither of which has to do with love: It provides a release of tension and a means of control. Like most womanizers, he regards women—even his own employees-as property, advancing them if they are cooperative, passing them off to other executives when he has finished with them, or firing them when they have outlived their usefulness.

  With his hawk-like face, pomaded hair, aquiline eyes, and streamlined figure clothed in black, William was the incarnation of Mephistopheles. Had Employees’ Entrance been made in 1934, when the production code was being enforced with a vengeance, the resolution would have been dramatically different. As it is, Anderson gets Madeleine drunk and takes advantage of her again in another elliptical fade out. Now a married woman, Madeleine is so overcome with shame that she attempts suicide. Indifferent to the suffering he has caused, Anderson taunts Madeleine’s husband into shooting him, but not fatally. The ending is truly pre-code: Anderson, who otherwise would have paid for his transgressions by being reduced to standing on breadlines, survives a coup and returns as the manager, more powerful than ever, employing the same tactics that he used earlier to bolster the store’s profits to survive the Great Depression. Employees’ Entrance was Warren William’s film. The script did not allow William to humanize Anderson; instead, he drew on the qualities that made his character succeed in a cutthroat business, when two-thirds of the nation could afford to shop at a department store on the order of Macy’s. He regarded the other third as potential employees, provided they could deliver what he wanted.

  Loretta fared better in her second film with William Wellman, Heroes for Sale (1933). And she would work with him twice more, at MGM (Midnight Mary), and finally at Fox (The Call of the Wild). Wellman was not the kind of director to discuss his films in detail; he mentions Heroes for Sale in his autobiography because it brought him in contact with his future wife, who was working in a Busby Berkeley musical on the next sound stage. Yet Heroes was the kind of film that Wellman understood; it was the companion piece to Wild Boys of the Road (1933), his take on the Great Depression from the point of view of kids riding the rails and hoping to establish their own utopia. Heroes was set in the same period, but within a different context, focusing on the plight of a World War I veteran, Thomas Holmes (Richard Barthelmess), who was never recognized for his heroic capture of a German soldier. Instead, the medal was awarded to a coward, who mustered up enough courage—thanks to a gun—to bring in the prisoner.

  Holmes incurs a spinal injury that requires morphine, resulting in addiction and eventual rehab. Once clean, he returns to the workforce and wanders into a friendly luncheonette, where Mary (Aline McMahon) rents him a room on a floor occupied by two other tenants, Hans, a bolshevik inventor, and Ruth, a laundry worker (Loretta). Ruth finds him a job at her
laundry, and before long, Holmes has convinced his co-workers to bankroll Hans’s new invention, a wringer washer. The owner of the laundry no sooner endorses the invention than he suffers a fatal heart attack. The business is sold, and the new owners think only in terms of cutting jobs and increasing profits. When Ruth is killed during a workers’ demonstration, Holmes is accused of being the instigator and sent to prison for five years. His release coincides with the red scare, when real or suspected Communists were being harassed, and in some cases, deported. Forced to join the ranks of the homeless, he meets, of all people (yes, coincidences mount in this film) the coward, who has been reduced to similar straits. As for the resolution—there is none, which is to screenwriter Robert Lord’s credit. Holmes has been thrown into the fiery furnace; the refining fire has burned away the past, leaving him transformed and defiantly homeless. Like the narrator in Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable, Holmes can say, “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.

  Playing another proletarian, Loretta looked surprisingly authentic, perhaps because the character survived on low-level jobs requiring no marketable skills—which might have been Loretta’s fate if she had never become an actress. It was roles like Ruth that revealed her empathy with working class women. She may not have been one herself, but she was an indefatigable worker, subjected to Warner’s acrobatic schedule requiring her to bounce from film to film at a pace that even the most energetic teenager would find daunting. Loretta did not need bargain basement clothes and a cosmetic makeover to play Ruth convincingly. Loretta never worked in a laundry, but she understood women who did. She had seen enough of them at her mother’s boarding house and on studio lots where they toiled as extras. She absorbed what she experienced, depositing it in a memory bank from which she drew, consciously or otherwise, for her characters. And when she could not connect with a character, she simply used her imagination.