The Woman Between (1931, Victor Schertzinger)

The Woman Between ought to be the most scandalous, salacious Pre-Code soap possible given the tawdry subject matter—trophy-ish wife Lili Damita (it’s complicated, she’s got her own business and she’s French) cheats on her husband on her latest voyage back from Europe and it turns out she’s shacked up with his son, Lester Vail. Now, they don’t know each other because Vail ran away from home when dad O.P. Heggie announced he was getting married. Apparently Vail didn’t even know Damita’s name? It seems like he might’ve heard it since she was a famous dress shop owner in New York but whatever….

The film takes about fifteen minutes—it only runs seventy—to get to that core drama; until then, it spends a bunch of time following Heggie’s daughter, Miriam Seegar, around as she prepares for Vail’s homecoming. Including going to Damita’s dress shop. But it actually opens with Seegar’s friend, Anita Louise, in an inventive opening title sequence.

Sadly that opening title sequence is the last time the film is inventive.

And then once it gets to the dress shop it seems like at the very least there will be amazing Art Deco set design. But then the shop is the only place with amazing Art Deco set design and we’re rarely going back to the shop.

When Damita arrives… well, she’s opposite Seegar and Louise and Seegar and Louise have already had enough material it’s clear they’re going to be godawful—it can’t be all their fault, given Schertzinger’s direction—but Damita gets some initial sympathy because Seegar and Louise are so bad. Then Heggie shows up and he’s bad, but then Vail shows up and he’s annoying; Damita runs out of sympathy fast.

Pretty soon, once Damita and Vail have realized what they’ve done, Woman Between gets engaging for it’s pure proto-camp value. Damita’s vamping around, Heggie’s doing this weird comedic thing, Seegar’s hissing… but the film’s got no sense of humor. It’s got joke sequences, always involving the staff—Halliwell Hobbes plays the butler and gets a bunch of it, but there’s some poor Black elevator operator who has to mug for Damita in an initial attempt to make her seem likable (which we never get again, actually)—and it’s always terrible. Because if Schertzinger’s even aware he needs timing, he’d have no idea how to execute it. And William Hamilton wouldn’t be able to cut for it.

Though, I’ll be a little nice—great photography from J. Roy Hunt.

The movie’s terrible and not even worth it for cringe-laughs, but Hunt’s black and white photography is excellent. Even though Schertzinger usually just has him shooting people standing against a wall–Woman Between might be a play adaptation, but it’s not stagy, it’s wall-y—at an angle. Terrible blocking in the film. Just real bad.

The ending makes a bit of a louder flop than expected—the third act, with better direction, might’ve been suspenseful—but the real problem is the performances, specifically Schertzinger’s direction of them.

Plus, you know, the script’s not good either. It’s just a soapy stinker.

The Bride of Frankenstein (1935, James Whale)

For The Bride of Frankenstein, director Whale takes a contradictory approach. It's either more is more, or less is less. More music, all the time. Franz Waxman's frequently playful music rarely fits its scenes, unless Whale is going for a melodramatic farce, which he really doesn't seem to be doing. I kept hoping he would be, because it might make the film more compelling.

More Monster–Boris Karloff is nonsensically running around the countryside, finding someone to accidentally kill or not. William Hurlbut's screenplay contrives connections between loose, if memorable, scenes and never pauses to explain why the Monster kills another little girl. Maybe he really liked doing it from the first one.

Of course, the Monster could explain since Karloff now has lines to deliver. But all of his lines are lame.

Poor Colin Clive has almost nothing to do. None of the characters in Bride have arcs running the whole film–not even the Monster–but Clive pops in at the beginning and then at the end. In one of Hurlbut's weaker moments, Clive goes from pro-mad scientist to anti-mad scientist at the snap of the fingers. It's ludicrous.

Ernest Thesiger's good as the villain. Valerie Hobson not as Clive's wife.

Whale doesn't have enough coverage so Ted J. Kent's editing is usually bad. Except the finale, which is wondrous and is so tightly edited, one has to wonder why the rest of the film is so loose. Probably because there has to be a story.

It's a trying seventy-five minutes.

The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936, John Ford)

Warner Baxter is one good actor. I’ve only seen him in one other film, but he’s great in The Prisoner of Shark Island. Baxter’s got a depth to him–he builds on it, adds to it, throughout scenes and throughout the film. Shark Island is about the physician who set John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg–and is an idealized portrait of the physician, which is unimportant–and almost everything in the film happens to Baxter… and when he actually has to do something for himself, it’s a big something.

Shark Island is another pre-World War II John Ford film. This John Ford is the one who made The Informer, not the one who made The Searchers (but it is the same Ford who made Stagecoach). Color didn’t change Ford too much, since the post-WWII cavalry trilogy are not the same Ford as this film and at least one of those is black and white. The Shark Island Ford is the one who did exciting things with confined space and people’s place in that space, as opposed to the later Ford, who did things with open space and the place of people in that space. That sentence has two “that” spaces, I hope it makes sense. Since Shark Island is from the 1930s and it’s from Fox, it has a certain feel to it. It’s filmic. Fox films from the 1930s don’t have the crispness of an MGM or Warner picture. Ford perfectly creates a 1860s time period too. It’s lushly rural for the Maryland scenes and then the scenes on the prison island are spacious but confined. With Shark Island, you get the feeling Ford didn’t know what he was doing and he was trying things. Ford is the most confident filmmaker I’ve ever seen, so seeing him exert himself and succeed is interesting.

He does get quite a bit of help from Nunnally Johnson’s screenplay. Johnson went on to write The Grapes of Wrath for Ford, which might be the last of this period of his career. Regardless, Johnson is unsung superstar. The Prisoner of Shark Island has a number of conversations and they’re these beautiful moments–even if they aren’t the defining conversations of the film, which are beautiful too–but these conversations are perfectly paced and rich. They’re rich. They’re full of living character. Ripe with it. Having Gloria Stuart as the wife makes a lot of the film work. Without her, it wouldn’t work as well. Stuart’s wonderful in the film. There’s also a great performance by Ernest Whitman, who was black and got fourteenth billing instead of fourth (which he deserved). Then there’s John Carradine as a sadistic prison guard. He’s so good and Ford knows it. He gives Carradine these awesome creepy angles, something a later Ford wouldn’t have done.

I guess Shark Island never had a VHS release in the United States–but Fox Movie Channel shows it a couple times a year (probably not for President’s Day, though it would be interesting–the film presents Lincoln as a humane, soft-spoken, decent person, which modern Americans certainly don’t find appealing in a president). I watched the Masters of Cinema release from the UK, which (for once) didn’t have any noticeable PAL speedup. It’s a good film to see, for both Baxter and Stuart, but particularly for Ford.