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The title is a play based on a Broadway diva's exploits, she enters on the witness stand for a smashing view of Constance Bennett swathed in furs with tilted cloche hat. The trial involves a former lover turned commissioner (Walter Pidgeon), in the gallery is her mom (Jobyna Howland) sneaking sips from a flask in between histrionic outbursts. "The Swedish nightingale," the artiste living her roles, "a hard-boiled trollop from Second Ave." She dotes on an adopted moppet ("The moment she's old enough to notice the difference between a good-looking boy and a plate of spinach, I'll be her shadow"), the orphanage takes the child away in the wake of scandal. The manager (Paul Lukas) still carries a torch, the playwright (Joel McCrea) falls in love during divorce proceedings. "It never fails. I've never set my heart on anything that didn't turn out to be married." Started by George Fitzmaurice, reshot and signed by George Cukor, a patchwork melodrama with a handful of sparkling moments. The visit to the Gas House District kicks off on a horse carriage and finishes on top of a water truck, the speakeasy has Walter Catlett and Sterling Holloway adding to the rowdy tessitura. Playful shoving and slapping for the foreplay, McCrea wields a butcher knife and takes a pie to the face before rolling on the chessboard kitchen floor with Bennett, the camera glides from the frisky couple to bacon sizzling on a pan—practically a proto-screwball passage and vibrating with Cukor energy. (Party balloons multiply out of Paul Klee in the boudoir the morning after, "I couldn't get into the chinchilla factory.") A dollop of Waterloo Bridge blunts the fun at the close. With Clara Blandick, Virginia Hammond, J.M. Kerrigan, and June Filmer. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |