Bad Girl (1931)
Don't let the name or the suggestive movie poster fool you, Bad Girl may sound like a Pre-Code picture that would include a story about a sexy girl about town, but this film is far from that. In fact I have no idea why the title is Bad Girl other than that was the title of the novel and play that was adapted to the silver screen, but still nothing suggests any kind of girl that is bad. The picture in fact is a humble piece of cinema from the depression era that would have spoken to the majority of audiences at that time, with a story about a couple making it through tough times while they try to blossom their love together. While most other big name films of this time showed relationships between rich individuals, Bad Girl gives a more gritty, down to earth look at how difficult it is when life and relationships seem to collide. This picture does just that in Academy Award winning fashion.Bad Girl tells the story of a more real to life type of relationship between two city dwellers as they sacrifice and joggle the issues of marriage, finances, and a coming child set to the backdrop of the Great Depression, a subject that hit most everyone in 1930s. Eddie (James Dunn) is a radio repairman that works hard with dreams of work and steady future. Dorothy (Sally Eilers) is a small time department store model who thinks all men have one thing on their mind until she meets Eddie, who has no interest in her at all. After initial friction the two become fond of each other and end up marrying, sacrificing what they have to be with each other. Eddie wants to be a loving and supporting husband, giving Dorothy a new home, spending all he has ever saved up. Dorothy wants to be a loving and supportive wife by not giving Eddie any worries when she discovers she is with child and they cannot afford what Eddie has done for her, postponing his dream of owning his own radio shop. With these two conflicting views on how they love each other, each sacrificing while the other does not know it, the two quarrel as a new child is born between the two of them. But the two discover that they both are in fact still very much in love with each other and continue on with their path of life, together into the great unknown future.
Director Frank Borzage is a filmmaker keen on stories of young lovers in the face of adversity. This is seen is his previous directorial Oscar winning film Seventh Heaven, an honor he would receive again with Bad Girl. The film feels fresh, for it is a realistic representation of love in the times that the film was released. Unlike other Hollywood features where main love interests are wealthy individuals who have butlers and maids, while living in mansions, and having lavish parties, this film does the exact opposite. The main characters are just getting by, living in city flats, lucky to have jobs and sacrificing all they have to just pay the bills. The character of Eddie wants so badly to give his wife and child the best that he finds he can make money desperately boxing after hours, being paid by the number of rounds he can compete in the ring. He doesn't want to worry his wife with that information, but his wife takes it the wrong way when he shows up late to drive his wife to the hospital to deliver his son, believing he went to a bar and got into a fight. These kinds of quarrels are out of love for each other and are aspects that can be paralleled in some fashion to real life. The story is simply of love and just getting by in hard times.
Bad Girl was a critical success for its time, winning Academy Awards for Borzage's directing and for adapted screenplay from the novel/play. The film was even nominated for best picture. Despite rather good praise and a heart-felt story, the film would be rather a footnote of cinema history, falling into a little disrepair with the original film prints. This is a sad character trait of many films for the earlier part of the 20th century as prints were not handled with as great of care, being thrown into boxes in corners of rooms, or for the lucky films kept in large, cool store rooms or warehouses where the celluloid, a sensitive form of plastic, safe from any elements. Despite the few moments of lack of care seen on screen in the preserved prints today and the overall non-interest seen in this picture, the film is rather good and worth watching even for a contemporary audience. The picture has a lot of heart on the subject of love and sacrifice. It is a gem forgotten in time.
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This film suffers from several different forms of mis-labeling. The promotional poster suggests pre-Code eroticism and the film delivers almost nothing in that regard. If anything, it is a POST-Code film in which the nascent Hays Code (drafted in 1930 but not strictly enforced until 1934) sucked the life out of the popular book (which was more obviously about premarital sex and pregnancy) and left us with an incomprehensible family drama where two newlyweds create absurd melodramatic complications by failing at the most basic communication skills. All she has to say is "I'm pregnant, honey," and all he has to say is "I love kids, we'll make this work" and then there's no movie.
ReplyDeleteThis film is also mis-labeled as a "Depression" film. The depiction of poverty is no different from the poverty pathos of pre-Depression films. Pre-Depression films with similar assumptions about poverty include A Corner in Wheat (1909), Intolerance (1916), The Kid (1921), Tess of the Storm Country (1922), Sparrows (1926), The Last Command (1928), The Crowd (1928), and The Broadway Melody (1929). If anything, the principal poverty pathos came from the remembered poverty of the previous generation. In the world of 1931 depicted, Eilers gets good medical care, Dunn has a steady job in a growing industry, and he manages to save money quickly albeit at a personal sacrifice. The film compares to Cimarron (1931) in which the then-present was portrayed as a time of great prosperity in comparison to the remembered deprivations of the late 19th Century.
The film has zero references to unemployment, the forgotten man, prosperity being just around the corner, any new deal, or the stock market crash. All of that Depression-vocabulary came out of the 1932 presidential election campaign, and was not anticipated in 1931 films -- even as it is ubiquitous in 1933 films.
The title and poster are completely misleading. When seeing both before I actually viewed the picture I thought I was going to see a picture more along the lines of Red Headed Woman (1932) or Baby Face (1933). Funny how sex was used to sell this, but then again as always the book was better than the movie.
DeleteAs for being mislabeled a Depression film, I tend to put a different perspective on it. At this point America was in its second full year of troubles, which I feel we can somewhat understand under today's troubles. I think Hollywood was not quite grasping onto how to deal with the economic emotion of the whole thing. Los Angeles was still a town on the grow, even looking forward to hosting the 1932 Olympic games, so I believe some people in Hollywood were sheltered from the strife.
It may not be until 1932, and the election, where publicly the issues were more well expressed by the politicians and newspapers. I would think that Hollywood was still feeling its way through depression as an issue, especially after just figuring out how to deal with the advent of sound that shook up the business top to bottom these past couple of years.
I believe that the feature provides an "American" story of one pulling themselves up and doing everything they can to make their way through tough times. I am more happy to see a film that uses poverty for a source of drama and as a plot device instead of for humor (i.e. Chaplin). At this point I think the movie industry was just now figuring out where the medium was going, finding a solid base for which to build on and allow for the grander creative boom that would come in 1933 moving forward.
The Depression point seems more obvious to me every time I think about it, and I can't ever get anyone to agree with me. You are right that Roosevelt was not powerful enough to trick people into thinking something they did not already feel, and bank failures and unemployment were in a bad cycle 1929-1932. But I still think that the post-election martyrdom over the Great Depression that is exaggerated even more in the post-War world is a historical innaccuracy. People were much poorer in 1911 than they were in 1931, so if you are living in 1931 and you know nothing about the future, you can not see your "troubles" as anything different from what your parents dealt with in 1911 or what your grandparents dealt with in 1886. If anything you are living in a big city and there are cars and buses and tall buildings and radios, that your own grandparents could never have dreamed of at your age. Dealing with poverty for pathos rather than humor is consistent with A Corner in Wheat (1909) and Intolerance (1915) and Tess of the Storm Country (1922) -- all pre-Crash. Dealing with poverty for laughs gets done with the obligatory stock-market-crash references post-election in one of the movies you turned me on to, Three Cornered Moon (1933).
ReplyDeleteThe worst of the information-filtering is to take anything light, funny, or optimistic from films of this period and attribute it to 'audiences needing to escape.' What would it take in a movie to make anyone question their assumptions about life during this time? The depressing movies prove the depression and the happy movies also prove the depression.
Have you seen The Artist (2011)? There was so much great attention to detail I was baffled by why they flashed "1929" as the year of side-by-side silent-vs-talking pictures when you and I know full well by having watched the movies that the critical transition year for that was 1928, and by 1929 all American films were talkies. Then comes the payoff with the obligatory stock market crash pathos (groan!), so the Douglas-Fairbanks-looking character can lose the rest of his money and be broke (which happened to which silent film star? Oh, yeah, none of them.)
I am fighting a lonely battle on this issue.
I don’t see myself as disagreeing with you, in fact I find myself in careful agreement with your points. And well-made ones at that. You are right in that years prior to the Depression people were just as poor if not poorer, including the generations of the 1910s and earlier as you noted. The question I think you may be asking is “what makes the poverty so much more significant in the 1930s than in any other years? Because that is not the case.” (I may be going on a limb here so I hope I am right.)
DeleteMy view on the Depression:
It is not that the stock market crashed the necessarily made people that much poorer, rather I think it was the years leading to the events of the crash that made the Depression more memorable to history books. The roarin’ 20s was a time of seemingly unparalleled success in America. Fresh from WWI, the US was for the first time a world power and with the help of the war culture spread across the nation and the world. American’s spent money more freely with the help of credit, which ultimately brought the times to an end, People were discovering new ways expressing their joys, even with the addition of Prohibition, which didn’t stop anybody from having a good time (wink wink). When the market crashed I believed it was the backlash from the 20s that created the Depression, going from such highs to lows so quickly.
As for films and the Depression:
The motion picture industry solidified in the 20s, setting the foundation of what was to come in the future years. Movie stars came into vogue, and the industry had become part of pop culture. I don’t know if you read my reply to you on Sons of the Desert, but I want to reiterate that when I mention the Depression in my posts I do so not to qualify a film, but rather quickly state the historical context of the time the film was released. I wish not to state one film’s importance on the fact that it had more or less to do this audiences coping with the Depression. I simply state it for the casual reader that may come across my writings the context of the history that might not be on their minds. Nothing more than that.
We must remember that movies were a major source of entertainment to general audiences, much in a similar manner as TV or the internet is to us today. People if they could afford to part with a few cents, would go to the theater for the mind numbing entertainment, viewing the cartoons, short subjects, and newsreels that accompanied the features. It was an escape from the outside world to many.
As for The Artist:
I enjoy that you and I both got caught up in the same inaccuracy of the story’s plot. Yes, the time shift was made simply for the lining up of the plot. But we both enjoyed the film for the similar reasons, for all the accuracies of the film industry and the time period that made us smile like we knew something many others did not while going into the feature. In the end it is just a movie, and the story was written up to follow a constructed plot with skewed facts that most transients would not know, unlike the more educated viewer in you or I. It is here when I must just get past the facts and simply allow myself to be lost in the movies. Just enjoy the show.
I hope I was able to draw some parallels with you on these subjects. I enjoy the sociology of the time period that these pictures were produced and find joy in knowing that there are others that can appreciation the richness of what they provide for then and today. I hope only to put some of these films in proper perspective and not overly qualify in my opinion what these films were and are. I let history and the films do the talking. I just want to enjoy the ride.
Good, I'm glad we can agree to sort of agree on this. In comparing your list to my list you are more studying films for artistic interest, and I took more of a historical bent to the point that I watched movies I knew would pretty much stink if they were the most popular films of their time, as a means of learning the history.
ReplyDeleteI'm a total amateur as a film buff, and work as a litigation attorney. On a complex case I will take every piece of paper, or every legal authority, make an extra copy, put it all in chronological order, and then read it like a novel. It sounds overly linear, but the sequencing will help tell the story and reveal a lot of cause-effect facts that can not be denied.
When you get further along I'll be interested in your take on some of my epiphanies or unsolved mysteries, like the post-War gloom of the late 1940's, and the fascination with isolation fantasies in the early 1960's. Then there's the emergence of Culture War previews that I start in the mid 1970's but may have been even earlier threaded into the Civil Rights and criminal rights (and backlash) of the late 1950's and early 1960's.
I do things the same way when I study different subject matters that interest me. I love putting things in order and reading them for the same cause-effect quality. It is so revealing to break down the story, seeing how thought patterns change from various angles, understand how different people looked at the same films, and getting into the heads of those that were their to experience them. I see a little kinship to our though patterns here.
DeleteAs for my film study... Yeah, I do look at the artistic point of it. My list follows many driving forces:
-Top box office draw to see what was the most popular for the day.
-Oscars (among other popular and lesser known awards) for looking at how the filmmaking community changed and how surprisingly corrupt it was at times, therefore influencing the business.
-The National Film Registry in the Library of Congress, for those that work so desperately tried to prove that certain films mean so much to our history that it should be preserved for all generations to see.
-Books and various lists (too wide to try to explain in shorthand) to give me different angles upon which to look at what may have been significant. AFI's many lists plays its role in thinking that it is film critiquing film and its history.
-Historical marks, which could be an actor, director, producer, a company, or what have you that premiered, made significant changes,or any other footnote I found particularly interesting in the long run of cinema history.
The above is just a taste, but I find film to be very fascinating as a recorded medium frozen in time that allows us to look back on itself, us, history, culture, and the minds of people in or around its time. This is fun to me. I am watching many things for the first time and seeing other pictures again with a new light all to get a better understand in the art of film and the world of the 20th century for my own curious enjoyment.
Once again I am glad you take interest as well.