by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I showed Charles last
Thursday evening a quite fascinating film from 1932 called The Greeks Had a
Word for Them. It started out in 1930 as
a hit play by Zoë Akins called The Greeks Had a Word for It, though even in the so-called “pre-Code” era the
Production Code Administration had enough clout to force producer Sam Goldwyn
to change the title to The Greeks Had a Word for Them — which Charles thought sounded dirtier than the
original. In 1938, in the post-Legion of Decency period of strict Code
enforcement, Goldwyn was able to reissue the movie and did not have to make any cuts in it to satisfy the new,
tougher censorship — but he did have to change the title again, to Three Broadway Girls, and that was the version we saw. The film was
directed by Lowell Sherman, who’s also in it as a lecherous star classical
pianist named Boris Feldman — he was both an actor and a director (he “made his
bones” as an actor by playing Lillian Gish’s evil seducer in D. W. Griffith’s
1920 film Way Down East and
pretty much played evil seducers for the rest of his career, though his best
performance as an actor was as the alcoholic director Maximilan Carey in the
1932 romantic drama What Price Hollywood?, the prototype for the three later versions of A Star Is Born) — from an adaptation by Sidney Howard of the
Akins play. Howard’s best known screen credits are Dodsworth and Gone with the Wind, classy projects that don’t all suggest he’d be
the right author for a raunchy comedy about three young women living together
in a ritzy Broadway apartment and setting out to put on an affluent front in
order to score rich men. If this plot sounds familiar, it should; 20th
Century-Fox bought the remake rights and in 1940 turned it into the Betty
Grable musical Moon Over Miami, and later in 1953 did the best-known version, How to Marry a
Millionaire, in which Grable again
appeared but the reason for its success, then and now, was Marilyn Monroe.
But Three
Broadway Girls captures the cynicism at
the heart of the story far more effectively than the “softer” later version,
and though Joan Blondell is the star the three women in the leads — Blondell as
the down-to-earth Schatzi Sutro, Madge Evans as the relatively innocent Polaire
Quinn, and Ina Claire (best known for her role as the “other woman” who loses
her kept-boy Melvyn Douglas to Greta Garbo in Ninotchka) as the most blatantly obvious gold-digger of the
bunch, Jean Lawrence — create a marvelous ensemble. The film opens with Jean on
an ocean liner returning from Paris; though her male companions have footed all
her other expenses she finds she can’t get off the boat unless she pays a $43
bar tab. No problem: she just turns on the charm to a man passing her as he
gets off the boat and persuades him to give her $50 for the bar bill, including
a tip. It’s one of the few times other actresses got to keep up with Blondell
(she was always the second lead in the Dick Powell-Ruby Keeler musicals but she
always played a much more interesting character than Keeler — and obviously
Dick Powell agreed with me, since the scripts had him falling in love with
Keeler but it was Blondell he married for real!) and a movie filled with wicked
wit the actors spit out so fast it’s really an ancestor of screwball comedy and
looks more like a movie from 1938 than one from 1932. The main men in Our
Anti-Heroines’ lives are Feldman and his relatively innocent friend Dey Emery
(David Manners — referencing The Miracle Woman and Dracula, I joked that he’d be saying to the other characters, “Well, my last
two girlfriends were an evangelist and a vampire”), and at a party given by
Feldman, Polaire shows off her own skills as a pianist and Feldman immediately
makes her an offer: if she’ll become his mistress he’ll give her private piano
lessons, take her around the world for two years and ultimately launch her on
her own career as his protégée, She’s willing to accept when Jean gets Feldman
to give her a mink coat, wiggles out of her dress so she’s naked under it, then
gets Feldman alone while Polaire is waiting outside Feldman’s apartment and
seduces him more directly than the basically decent Polaire dared. Then Jean
dumps Feldman and sets her vampiric (in the Theda Bara, not the Bela Lugosi,
sense!) sights on Dey’s father, Justin Emery (Phillips Smalley), and the two
are about to get married in the last reel when Schatzi and Polaire save Emery père from their gold-digging roommate by hustling her
off to Paris, with Dey joining them on the same boat to follow through on his
intent to marry Polaire and make an honest woman out of her.
There’s also
another sugar daddy in the mix, a man named “Pop” whom we never see who at
different times had cash-and-carry relationships with all three Broadway girls,
though when he dies we get to hear his voice because he recorded an audio
codicil to his will in which he describes Schatzi and Polaire as having treated
him reasonably, but then says, “As for Jean … ,” and launches into a tirade
against her. “That’s a lie!” she screams — and the record answers her, “I knew
you were going to say that!” That’s the best line in a film that’s full of
them, and it’s by far the best movie Lowell Sherman ever directed — at least
among the ones I’ve seen; he did Mae West’s star-making vehicle, She Done
Him Wrong, but that can’t be counted
a directorial triumph because no matter who got the director credit, Mae West
was always her own auteur. He also directed Katharine Hepburn’s first Academy Award-winning
performance in Morning Glory (1933) — also from a script by Zoë Akins — though it was a pretty
standard comedy-drama about an up-and-coming actress and the weakest
performance of the three she gave that year (Dorothy Arzner, who directed
Hepburn’s immediately preceding film, Christopher Strong — also from an Akins script — got a beautiful,
multi-faceted performance out of her, as did George Cukor in her immediately
following film, Little Women, while Sherman just stood back and let Hepburn posture, starting her
tradition of winning Academy Awards for her weaker movies and being passed over
for her great ones) — and in 1930 Sherman had starred in and directed The
Pay Off, an intriguing RKO
gangster movie that got a better remake as a 1939 “B” by Lew Landers as Law
of the Underworld. So I was surprised at how
well Sherman directed the tough, brittle comedy of Three Broadway Girls and created a real ensemble comedy instead of
relying on a legendary woman’s star persona. This wasn’t one of the films Sam Goldwyn was
proudest of — he let it slip into the public domain, which was something he
rarely did — but it’s a great comedy, a real “sleeper” from the so-called
“pre-Code” era and a fun movie that deserves to be better known than it is.
Certainly it’s a lot more fun than the later, more famous but also more anodyne
versions of the story!
