Summer Under the Stars 2011 -- Day Nine Review: Three On a Match

I first became interested in classic films after taking an early film history class during my freshman year in college, and one of the things we spent a lot of time talking about in that class was the difference between Pre-Code and Post-Code films, "Code" referring to the Hays Code, which put heavy censorship guidelines on all Hollywood films released between 1934 and (roughly) 1960. Prior to 1934, the rules governing what was and was not acceptable to show onscreen were much looser, and decisions regarding racier subjects like sex and drug use were often left to the discretion of the individual studios. I don't mean to suggest that Pre-Code films were as graphic as films today, but they were closer than many people think, and in some ways are more shocking, because they manage to be blunt without being crude, as in Golddiggers of 1933, which includes a dance number featuring naked women in silhouette and one woman encased in metal, while a man leers at her and approaches her with a gigantic can opener.

Some of my favorite Pre-Code films are the aforementioned Golddiggers; the 1932 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, with Fredric March and Miriam Hopkins; and Ernst Lubitsch's Design for Living, with March, Hopkins, and Gary Cooper as a trio who devise a ménage à trois arrangement so that each man can be with Hopkins' character without ruining their relationship with one another. (The film never directly addresses the homosexual aspect of the arrangement, but Cooper and March do a lot of very close talking throughout, and both of their characters are artists, and they're frickin Gary Cooper and Fredric March, so I think we can all read between the lines.)



Ann Dvorak

Three On a Match, released in 1932 and directed by Mervyn LeRoy, looks at life from a decidedly more somber point of view than Design for Living, but is no more reserved in the way it addresses taboo subject matter. The title of the film refers to the belief that lighting three cigarettes off the same match is unlucky, and that the lighter of the third cigarette will be the first to die -- in this case, the "three" refers to three childhood acquaintances played by Ann Dvorak, Joan Blondell, and Bette Davis, whose lives intertwine again as adults. I chose the film for Dvorak, who is technically the "star" of the film, with Blondell a close second; Davis, in one of her earliest screen roles, is given little to do as the brainy, reserved member of the trio. Dvorak is largely unknown to audiences today (possibly because there seems to be some confusion over how to say her name; I've only ever heard it pronounced "D-vorak," but her wikipedia page claims it's pronounced "Vor-shak," which seems a little like me deciding I'm going to pronounce my name "L'bersham"), but she was a popular star for a time in the early thirties, and she makes the most of her part in Three On a Match, playing the role of good-girl-gone-bad Vivian with an honesty that manages never to cross into the grotesque.

  

Unlike Design for Living, the nature of the story in Three On a Match isn't exactly racy; rather, it's the way the story plays out on screen. When Dvorak's Vivian becomes bored with her privileged life, she goes on a bender to end all benders, shacking up in a hotel with a gambler, becoming addicted to alcohol and cocaine, and neglecting to feed or bathe her young son, whom she's dragged along for the ride. We don't see much of the sexual relationship between Vivian and the gambler, but we do see her passed out on a bed with drug paraphernalia scattered all around her, and later shuffling around in a cocaine-induced haze, continuously rubbing at her nose -- none of which would have made it onscreen a few years later. The fact that Blondell's former wild child Mary becomes the hero of the film also likely wouldn't have flown with the censors, because part of what the Hays Code did, much more than censoring objectionable images, was to censor objectionable ideas, like that a bad girl could end up happy and a "good" girl could end up imprisoned in a drug den with her child, her boyfriend, and a bunch of gangsters.

Parts of Three On a Match are rather silly, especially the ending, although it doesn't play quite as silly as it would sound if I wrote it out here. Overall, it's a quick, entertaining movie, and worth watching not only to see three actresses at different stages of their respective careers, but also to look at life in the early thirties without the soft-focus lens of the Hays Code. I have a feeling that, had the film been shot just two years later, the outcome would have been very different.

Grade: B+

Summer Under the Stars 2011 -- Day Three Review: The Old Maid

No matter how wildly the theme of TCM's Summer Under Stars varies from year to year, one thing remains the same: they will always, without exception, devote a day to at least one of the following five actors: Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, James Stewart, Cary Grant, or Humphrey Bogart. (This year, they're featuring four, with only Hepburn left out.) The reasoning behind this is pretty obvious -- although TCM doesn't depend on advertising dollars to sustain itself, it does, like any television channel, depend on viewers, and the average person is more likely to stop and watch Katharine Hepburn in The Philadephia Story than, say, Maureen O'Sullivan in Anna Karenina, or even Greta Garbo in Anna Karenina. Garbo's name has survived; her visage, less so. In the case of the five actors mentioned above, their names and their faces have persevered, and all of them made films that even the most casual viewer might want to see: Woman of the Year; All About Eve; Vertigo; To Catch a Thief; Casablanca. They also all had personas bigger than themselves, personas that over the years made them into cultural icons, so that even a guy who typically doesn't like "old movies" might see Bogart's face and think, "This is going to be about gangsters. I'll watch it." As nice as it might be to have an entire month dedicated to people like Jean Gabin and Lon Chaney, viewership would almost certainly go down.

Which is not to say I'm disappointed they dedicated the third day of August to Bette Davis. I never mention Davis when asked about my favorite classic actors, but that's only because I assume that liking her is a given. Of course I like Bette Davis. Most people like Bette Davis. (I say "most" because I, for one, would not want to be lumped into the assertion that "everybody" likes Cary Grant, or "everybody" likes Gene Kelly.) I would say that Davis is my favorite of the actors listed above, and when I sit down to watch one of her movies, I feel safe in assuming that she'll be good in it and that, at the very least, I'll be entertained.

The Old Maid does nothing to dispute that assumption. Adapted from a short story by Edith Wharton, it tells the story of two cousins, Charlotte and Delia (Davis and Miriam Hopkins), looking for husbands during the early days of the Civil War. Delia marries for money, setting herself up comfortably for life, but when Charlotte becomes pregnant by one of Delia's former suitors, she finds her own chances for marriage greatly diminished (the former suitor, of course, falls victim to one of the great classic film plot devices and DIES IN THE WAR.) The rest of the story is typical women's film fare: Charlotte attempts to raise her daughter Tina on her own, but knowing she is setting up the child to be shunned by society, she eventually moves in with her cousin and allows Delia to become Tina's mother, relegating herself to the position of the old maid aunt. Commence Charlotte's tableau of self-sacrifice.

The Old Maid is a good film, but it's not great. Both Davis and Hopkins outshine the material, which seems to spend more time skipping ahead through the decades, turning Charlotte's hair grey and bringing her daughter from pigtails to high heels, than it does showing what happens during the years in between. No really satisfactory explanation is given as to why Charlotte feels she has to go to such an extreme in making herself an old maid, nor does Delia ever truly establish herself as an antagonist -- she's tricky, manipulating Charlotte through ostensibly "kind" acts, but she's an angel in comparison to the selfish characters Hopkins plays in The Heiress and The Children's Hour. The film can't seem to decide whether Delia is the ultimate in passive-aggressive villainy, or simply latching on to chances to help herself at the same time she helps her cousin. In the final scene, when she instructs Tina to save her very last kiss for Charlotte on her wedding day, it's hard to say for sure whether she is being kind or once again manipulating her cousin, knowing that with both of their children married off, they'll only have each other for company for the rest of their lives.

This is where I should probably talk about how Davis and Hopkins hated each other in real life; how Davis slept with Hopkins' husband, the director Anatole Litvak; how Hopkins did everything she could to upstage Davis in their scenes together, down to messing with her makeup so she would appear younger in the scenes where Charlotte and Delia have aged; but the same story comes up every time anyone talks about The Old Maid, and I don't have anything new to add to it. Davis and Hopkins did hate each other, but both Davis and Hopkins hated many of their costars, and both had reputations for being difficult on set. Both were also excellent actresses (even Davis admitted as much), and in the end, The Old Maid probably benefitted from their rivalry, infusing every scene between Charlotte and Delia with an undercurrent of dislike and mistrust.

Grade: A-