SCARLET EMPRESS, THE
1934 - ****
Von Sternberg was very advanced artistically but one could argue he never quite entered the sound era, preferring the language of symbols, small gestures, and intertitles -all of which nearly suffocates the first half of SCARLET EMPRESS, which is based on the diaries of the sexually voracious Catherine II of Russia. The film begins constrasting the flower-encrusted but regimented life of a young Austrian noble woman whose married to Russian Prince Peter the Half-Wit --via long distance courier, the handsome, brooding, impeccably-uniformed John Lodge. The beginning scenes in Prussia are so unbearably stuffy with 17th century decor and pompously over-orchestrated Russian melodies that an air of claustrophobia hangs over everything, there's one unbearable matriarch after another as Dietrich is poked and prodded like a piece of meat at the butcher's; by the time Lodge has whisked her fully off to Moscow he's in love with her and she with him, and we're in love with all the richly photographed sable wraps. The reigning queen in Russia is played by perennially-cranky 'dowager empress' (Louise Dresser), and her no-good nephew Peter a bug-eyed Sam Jaffe, who dislikes his new wife and returns to prowling through the Satanic art-bedecked corridors of the royal palace like Harpo Marx on meth crossed with MESA OF LOST WOMEN's Dr. Leland.
Things are even more oppressive in Russia, at least at first. The dowager doesn't give a damn about what Catherine wants, so long as there's an heir to the throne. Between all the horses marching tediously along by the hundreds (JVS digs filming his "1,000 extras") and the intertitles ("Pushed like a brood mare into a marriage with a royal half-wit") and nature shots, lockets falling gently down the length of vast trees, lengthy songs in churches and ringing bells, and strangely modern, rather overwrought Satanic sculptures at ever turn, this may be the most staid, nonrepresentational and boring, IVAN THE TERRIBLE-prefiguring film ever made. That said, John Lodge inhabits the bright, drearily cheery Austrian parlor in the beginning like a tall dark shadow, glistening with sexy sable collars, and if you're in the right half-asleep, stressed frame of mind wherein you dig falling asleep to the molasses-slow poetic kink of Jean Rollin, then Von Sternberg being a little too obsessed with the sadomasochistic double bind of Marlene being forced to brood mare it up, and the urge of Peter to drill holes through his mom's walls so he can spy on any lesbian hanky panky, then you should have no trouble sponging up any aesthetic gloom overkill, and just lean back and watch Dietrich age 20 years over the course of the film. Based on what Von Sternberg writes in his Notes from a Chinese Laundry, that's kind of what happened, thanks to his slowly mounting hatred of his icy star.
LADIES THEY TALK ABOUT
1933 - ***1/2
"Watch out for her. She likes to wrestle," notes convict Lillian Roth of a cigarillo-smoking lesbian who looks not unlike famed lover of Garbo (and possibly Babs), Mercedes De Acosta. It's only one quick shot during a long and engaging women's prison tour Roth gives Barbara Stanwyck after she proves herself tough enough to get along, but knowing what we know about Stanwyck's private life (though she never came out of the closet, so it might not be 100% true) it's interesting to find her character semi-mocking a fellow sewing circle sister onscreen; then again, at least the gay/lesbian reality was represented, especially at Warner Brothers, where fey tailors (such as one taking Cagney's measurements for a new suit in PUBLIC ENEMY, only recently restored after being cut for re-release) were made fun of, but never sneered at or hate crime targets. They existed, in some form, only in the pre-code era. After 1934 (and LADIES was never re-released since they'd have to cut too much), lesbians simply ceased to exist.
The bulk of the rest of the film deals with an on-off love affair between gang moll Babs and a moral crusader Dan Slade (Preston Foster). After he gets her off, she takes a risk and confesses she was really guilty, and he does what's right and betrays her into the joint. She gets even by tearing up all his pleas to see her; then when she relents it would be right around the same time she's aiding two men from across the prison in an escape. Dan's a sap all the way, and his terminal earnestness all but mocked openly by WB screenwriters. Stanwyck tears up the screen as well as those letters, with her toughness and casual wit set to kill and stun and then kick your twitching corpse. The huge gaggle of women, with a few exceptions, are all great friends, the bull-ettes are nice if you behave. This women's jail seem almost like Vassar except, as when Lillian Roth sings "One Hour with You" while mooning over a glossy of Joe E. Brown, you know that hetero-wise, things are pretty desperate.
FRIENDS AND LOVERS
1931 - **
Laurence Olivier goes a bit bananas as a betrayed buddy in this stuffy, tangled FAREWELL TO ARMS-meets D.H. Lawrence-ish saga. The best parts are in the beginning, with Erich Von Stroheim as nymphomaniac Lilly Damita's porcelain collector aesthete husband. He's so deliciously degenerate, lolling languidly in the surf of Menjou's discomfort at having his lame inner tube alibi slowly deflated (Erich teases them over their inconsistent guesses at which opera they supposedly saw), and it turns out he's quite pleased at catching Menjou because he blackmails her many lovers, charging Menjou $10,000. because "porcelain is... expensive." We root for Erich all the way, especially since Damita is such a wearying screen presence; either way, she has to shoot him not because he whips her, but because she really does love Menjou, presumably, though it seems more like she's just really hung over, and her hair is a mess. Nice legs, though. Too bad that later best buddy and fellow Damita-schtupper Olivier trying to shoot Menjou in a fit of jealous pique (by this time Damita already has another fiancee in the wings). This all seems to be enough of a climax for MGM and the ending abruptly dumps us on the curb, since everyone's weekending at beloved old character actor Frederick "Here's to the House of Frankenstein!" Kerr's estate, and though he's cool with underhanded business, eh what, his shrewish wife boots them out for conformity's sake. It's a lot business that adds up to little more than the bros-before-hos credo 'tested' and broken on the rocks of Damita's scattered lips.
THE RICH ARE ALWAYS WITH US
1932 - **1/2
Divorce was enough of a subject for a film back in 1932, even at Warner Brothers. Here the action revolves around novelist Julian (George Brent) pestering newly-divorced rich socialite Ruth Chatterton into marriage - she wants to have a little fun in Paris first, where she goes to get a divorce. While she's off her kid sister-like college chum Bette Davis falls all over Julian, but in Midge kind of way. Brent flies escapes on some assignment in the Carpathians, but stops in Paris to pitch woo, then sulks and stomps off when she rebuffs his proposals, and decides to go bail out her husband, a broker losing his clients since he re-married a ditzy Paris Hilton-esque gold-digger and spending his nights trying to look alert and interested at night clubs. Sappy and sacharine as Brent's little 'purr-voiced' style, and the lame chemistry with Chatterton is (highlight of bad lines being, "Will you think I've fallen out of love with you if I light a cigarette") Davis' dialogue is smart, the issues of marriage and divorce rather adult, and it's got Warner Brothers punch from director Alfred E. Green (BABY FACE), but there's only so much you can do with this sort of material. Martyrdom on the altar of marriage is old hat, but here it's very modern, since the divorced couple stay in touch and remain friends, to the chagrin of both their new mates. The bitchy new young wife especially is out to get Chatterton, thinks she's pregnant, then again she doesn't want to have a baby "and ruin this figure? For some squawling brat?" Bam she's killed in a car wreck. But at least she got to say what everyone's thinking. Julian would be better off with Davis, but that's not to say Chatterton doesn't have great ditzy appeal; she's the living hybrid stop between Carole Lombard and her mother in MY MAN GODFREY (1936)
