Capsule Reviews: The Smiling Lieutenant, Ménilmontant, The Miracle Woman

The Smiling Lieutenant (Ernst Lubitsch, 1931)

A delightfully wicked musical that puts the Lubitsch touch on full display, The Smiling Lieutenant has the sophistication and subtly charged sensual construction one expects of the artist. Maurice Chevalier is a joy as the titular lieutenant Niki, putting his massive grins and thick accent to hysterically suggestive use with some lines that show Lubitsch, as ever, pushing himself to the limit of decency. Claudette Colbert, playing Niki's naughty true love, asks him whether the princess he's unwittingly been forced to marry is blond or brunette. "I don't know," replies Chevalier with a caddish grin, removing all doubt as to what hair he's really talking about. The songs are all jovial, but if you pay attention to the lyrics you realize they could be sung in a pub after a pint or four. It all ends with a demented (yet classy, natch) spin on Cyrano as Franzi teaches Anna how to make our lieutenant switch his affections, and a significant fade-out puts a wider smile on Niki's face than ever before. The way Miriam Hopkins looks when she finally grabs her husband's attentions? Hell, I'd be singing too. Grade: A-

Ménilmontant (Dimitri Kirsanoff, 1926)

The phrase "avant-garde Russian silent cinema" is redundant; I've yet to see a Russian film from the '20s that was anything less than confrontational and experimental, even when it amounted to nothing more than naïve propaganda. Ménilmontant named for the Parisian suburb where it was shot, may technically be a French work, but one need not be told that a Russian emigré directed it to know its true national roots. Opening with an unexplained, terrifyingly edited and grisly axe murder of the parents of two young girls, Ménilmontant soon morphs into an abstracted tale of grief and isolation, following the sisters as they grow up and slowly drift apart when one of them gets a lover. A host of silent-era techniques—including double exposure, superimposition, impressionistic close-ups, mood-setting pillow shots of buildings and nature, and, of course, montage—create a manic state of bewilderment and poetic terror as the women discover what a harsh world it really is out there for a lady. This neglected masterwork feels like a proto-feminist, modernist fairy tale as made by Dziga Vertov. With potential like that, who needs intertitles? Grade: A+

The Miracle Woman (Frank Capra, 1931)

An improvement over Capra and Stanwyck's first collaboration, chiefly because Capra, having figured out how to work with Stanwyck's style, now knows how to get even more out of her. The story itself is simple, but it's noteworthy that Capra would rework its basic theme—a protagonist giving up prestige and wealth for morality and/or love—several times after Hays office cracked down but always with the more acceptable male lead instead of a strong-willed female played with fiery, if fabricated passion by Stanwyck. Oddly prescient in its depiction of ludicrously ostentatious evangelism (shame Jerry Falwell never stuck his fat ass in a lion cage for a stunt), The Miracle Woman boasts three unforgettable setpieces in its first 20 minutes. The second half doesn't match the brilliant staging of Stanwyck's opening sermon, theatrical debut as a charlatan (she emerges on-stage over roused men like the dancing robot in Metropolis) and the averted suicide of the sweet blind man, an otherwise grating presence who often plays like a self-treating Patch Adams. I was also mildly disappointed that its rich potential for social commentary gave way to the usual Capra story of an affirming romance. Nevertheless, Capra's increasing visual sophistication, Stanwyck's dynamic performance and a flirtation with the dark side of Pre-Code immorality make this one of the director's more enjoyable pictures. Grade: B

Baby Face (Alfred E. Green, 1933)

There is something indefinite about Barbara Stanwyck's overpowering effect, a subconscious response triggered by an almost imperceptible shift in body language. A lightly cocked eyebrow, a slight repositioning of a leg, all tiny, calculated moves designed for a delayed response to a beauty that, mere moments ago, didn't seem remarkable but is suddenly intoxicating. She made the perfect seductress, someone who doesn't announce herself from afar but waits to ensnare men as they pass by, forcing a double-take that draws them in more wholly and madly than the bombshells. Those ladies wielded their bombshell-selves like the artillery for which they were named, but Stanwyck got up close and personal. If love is a battlefield, she was a black-ops guerrilla. There's a line in Joseph McBride's Capra biography that calls her beauty "proletarian," which is indicative not only of the unexpected power of her uncommonly common looks but of the forceful impact of that beauty when it was unleashed.

Yet despite this singular power, Stanwyck possesses the capacity to portray this Venus flytrap man-baiting as something other than sinister sexual warfare. Sure, everyone remembers her turn in Double Indemnity, one of the bar-setters for the femme fatale icon, but compare her man-devouring turn there to her more enamored brush with hapless innocence in Ball of Fire, where she in no way softens her appeal but manages to fall for a man so resolutely innocent that she must overcome pangs of shame for being with him. Even when she was naughty, which was always, Stanwyck could find ways not only to unearth some nugget of guilelessness in her tramps but to suggest that her forthright seduction was a valid expression of sexual identity. I would say this was incredible given the time period in which she worked, but never mind all that: when's the last time a film made today gave its females such nonjudgmental sexual freedom?

Baby Face, a Pre-Code film to rival The Public Enemy in its sheer onslaught of "How did they get away with that?" sights and sounds, does not contain Stanwyck's greatest performance (not that such a thing is easy to suss out), but it may be the most indicative and representative of her talents. The story of a speakeasy dame raised a tramp by her father, who began prostituting her to his patrons when she was just 14, Baby Face is a depiction of Nietzschean self-realization through sexual aggression. A regular sets off the young woman's evolution when he hands her a copy of Will to Power and urges Lily (Stanwyck) to "use men to get the things you want." When her degenerate father dies in a distillery explosion, Lily has the freedom to pursue her dreams, and she promptly heads to the big city to quite literally sleep her way to the top.

Stanwyck is electric from the first moment. We don't see the little girl being exploited by her father, only the hardened, streetwise moll who's grown up not to take any crap from men even if she still lies down with one every night. She won't let her father fire her friend, the black maid Chico, and when the man tries to shame her Stanwyck wracks herself in fury when she explodes back at the man who would try to make her feel guilty for the woman he made of her. Alfred E. Green's camera is quick to note her legs, scanning up them in a POV shot of a sleazy politician, but even if he didn't try to emphasize them, Stanwyck certainly would have made sure we couldn't ignore 'em. At all times, Lily knows just how to position her legs for maximum tease, including and especially when she plays the part of the wilting flower. After that initial POV pan, Green does not overplay the legs again, but even in the flash of time he gives Stanwyck to arrange herself, she can snap to a man-killing position. After a time, men get wise to her game, but when she shows of those gams, the reaction shots of suddenly thick-tongued gentlemen show her dismantling even those who think they know her.

Stanwyck's body control is so precise one gets the sense she can individually control every synapse. When she arrives in New York, she heads to a bank looking to get a job, ignoring the women marching out in a huff at having been stymied by the boss' assistant. But when Lily walks in there and begins cooing in the portly man's ear, carefully leaning in to pull her blouse tight, the man's head whips around so fast I hope he has health insurance. When a rising executive and the forthcoming son-in-law of the bank's V.P. catches her with a married worker, he moves to fire her, but Lily pushes against him and looks up sweetly, her pupils dilating into wide-eyed innocence with the ease of flaring nostrils. Stanwyck puts no conviction into her voice when she butters up these men, but only because she doesn't need to. She doesn't want to either: having internalized Nietzsche, she won't play the weakling any more than she needs to in order to stay on the path to domination. After a time, Lily even stages getting caught so that she can meet and consume the man on the next ladder rung.

Green's camera gives ample evidence that the director was smart enough to stand back and just let Stanwyck do her thing, but he injects some magnificently cheeky shots here and there. Besides the aforementioned journey up Stanwyck's body, Green marks the progression of Lily through the men at the bank with a recurring shot of a the camera moving upwards as Lily moves up a floor with each conquest. He makes this motif even funnier by scoring it to "St. Louis Blues," though sadly it would be another two decades before Louis Armstrong would record a version with his All-Stars bawdy enough to fit the visual suggestion. Though he obviously does not show anything explicit, Green almost seems to be in a contest with himself to see just how much he can show before cutting away or fading out. It's no wonder this film was cut up when it was re-shown in the wake of the Hays Code, and still surprising in its audacity after being restored in 2004.

Yet despite the overwhelming sexual power Green and Stanwyck assign to the character, neither rushes to cast her as a villain for her steady progression through men. Like Nietzsche, Lily is beyond good and evil. She's not a monster, merely someone who has internalized the need to establish herself. She must assert her position, and to do so necessitates moving over a host of men, even if she has to step on a few relationships and promising careers in the process.

Green highlights a passage in one of Lily's Nietzsche books advising the reader to "crush out all sentiment," and for a time the film does just that. It depicts a murder-suicide, rampant scandal and even Lily's refusal to help her final conquest, the bank's playboy inheritor Courtland Trenholm (George Brent, who may well have taken the part just to list a character name like that on his resumé), when the bank fails and gossiping directors choose him as a scapegoat. This is a movie where John Wayne himself is but one of many men Stanwyck chews up and discards, leaving him distraught with confusion and desire. (In fairness, it must have been incredibly confusing to John Wayne, even before the stardom that wouldn't arrive for six more years, to be the jilted one.)

In the end, however, the film softens Lily through an eleventh hour change of heart that sends her back to the last lover she ruined. This is a recurring event in Stanwyck pictures, where suddenly she finds herself in the position of at last discovering the most malleable, lovesick man who can improve her station and discovers, sometimes too late, that she finally returns a man's affections. But Green manages to complicate even this seeming capitulation, adding a haunting sense of gravity to the final exchange of looks and faint smiles as a failed suicide attempt leads to a hint of reconciliation. It's still at odds with the rest of this flagrantly transgressive movie, but even its sentiment has a gonzo edge to it. Baby Face may not necessarily be a great film, in the way that nearly all Pre-Codes seem to grimy to ever take on the mantle "great," but it's a damn sight more entertaining than movies seem to allow themselves to be anymore. Keep your explosions and your titillation; the sight of Stanwyck marching over the stiff (*ahem*) bodies of felled men is as dynamic and in-your-face as cinema gets.

Blood Money (Rowland Brown, 1933)

Rowland Brown's snarling Pre-Code feature Blood Money was thought lost for decades, perhaps out of wishful thinking for decency's sake. The story of cop-turned-amoral bondsman Bill Bailey (George Bancroft), Blood Money is an unsentimental, occasionally repellent dive into the criminal underworld by way of one of its transitory members. Bill talks a big game and hands out Cuban cigars by the handful, but his arrogance is tempered by the quiet knowledge that the criminals he considers friends and allies will desert him at the earliest sign of trouble.

The Depression-era underworld Brown drifts through is a topsy-turvy fever dream of transvestism, bootlegging and sadomasochism. There's no moral to offset the madness of the film's crime-ridden social pits; if anything, Brown considers crime a completely viable form of business in the Depression. Without it, how would you know you were in the city?

Brown's film has some of the awkward pacing of the early talkies, but his brutal wit manages to box back any snags in the narrative. Innuendo infuses nearly every line, and Brown's blunt visual style keeps matters so off-keel that the occasional moments of stiffness never slow down the nightmare. Bill's movements through speakeasies and racetracks offer some baffling sights: a woman in drag (complete with monocle) stands like a butler at a party. When Bill offers her a cigar, she drawls, "You big cissy" like a disappointed father. Even stranger, Bill wheezes with uncontrollable laughter, one of several indications that he too might fall somewhere in-between sexual roles.

Some of the film's transgressiveness isn't even intentional but the result of retrospective career evaluations. Frances Dee, who would later be known for more wholesome roles and her early retirement to raise a family, here plays a bored rich girl slumming around the underworld to tend to her dark fetishes. She shoplifts for the fun of it, suggests a bisexuality primarily based on a need to screw whomever's nearest, and a sadomasochism she pins down to a need for someone to "give me a good thrashing." Judith Anderson, one of the great stage actresses of the era, makes her film debut as Ruby, a speakeasy madam and Bill's only true friend in the world. Despite her talent, Anderson only ever got cast as the gruesome hag in film because of her looks, and Brown's nonjudgmental view of his characters is perhaps best exemplified by his casting of her as a sex symbol and the only character in the film with anything approaching true beauty.

But that's not to say Brown condemns anyone else. He prefers instead to show the blurred lines that separate out the various touchstones of civilized society. As has been said, gender and sexual distinctions muddy with the cross-dressing and sexual ambiguity. Naturally, Brown also erases the thin blue line separating cop from criminal: Bill spends his nights carousing around the underworld, but he can also rub elbows with legitimate businessmen, even the D.A. himself. The cops do chase the criminals, but they also seem to accept the idea of crime; after all, without it, they'd have no job.

That unspoken agreement between the law and the street trash forms the basis for the climax: Drury, Ruby's deadbeat jailbird brother, robs a bank as soon has he gets out of prison, a move that threatens a life sentence. Bill, for Ruby's sake, gives him the bail money, but Elaine, smitten with this dangerous criminal, swaps out Bill's cash for worthless bonds and absconds with the robber, who thinks himself Scot-free. When the bail bounces, people assume Bill shortchanged Drury, and the one thing that cannot be forgiven in this sleazy world is a double-cross. Even Ruby, who clearly still loves Bill despite his faded attraction to her, cannot abide such a transgression, and her organization of the criminal elements against him seems more a response to this breaking of the rules than any emotional attachment to her own flesh and blood.

The climax of the film is hilarious and, considering its utter lack of redemption, oddly touching. The mob uses an 8-ball packed with explosives to kill Bill while he's playing pool (a reference to a similar, albeit lighter, element taken from Buster Keaton's Sherlock, Jr., perhaps?). The truth is uncovered with only minutes to spare, leading to a brilliantly cross-cut sequence of Ruby racing to the billiards hall as Bailey has an almost unfortunately good game that speeds him through his shots. But when the crisis is averted, Bill and Ruby get back together as if they'd just come through the typical rom-com Big Misunderstanding. Elaine, dumped by Drury for making him an unwitting traitor, runs into a woman walking out of an office in tatters, sobbing that she answered an ad about modeling work and was instead viciously assaulted. Elaine forcefully asks where she can find the man, but before she marches off, the look of pure lust and hunger on her face suggests she isn't going to go put a stop to the man's violent streak.

Spared the moral shackles of the Hays Code, Brown never has to worry about saddling his film with a message. Because of this, his grimy portrait of an amoral society actually feels more identifiably human despite its lunacy. Brown doesn't judge anyone for his or her weirdness, doesn't validate the system after spending so much time in the depths of it. There's no outright violence or sex in Blood Money, but it feels dirtier than the glorified softcore porn that passes for action fare these days. But for all its sordid detail and for-the-cheap-seats acting, Blood Money is still an engaging and unexpectedly intelligent film. I've not seen many Pre-Code pictures, but this ranks among my favorites.