Good Dame

When exactly did the Production Code take full force? I know it was in 1934, the year this movie was released, but this hit the theaters in March, and it seems pretty much pre-code to me.

Sylvia Sidney is a chorus girl stranded in a small town, with $62 and her ticket back to Chicago. She's walking to the train station when a carnival pickpocket steals her purse, tears up the ticket and splits the money with his partner, 3-card Monte hustler Fredric March. He then runs into Miss Sidney, hears her tale of woe, and gets her a job in the show. She balks, when it turns out to be as a cootch dancer, but she gets snatched in a police raid, and March bails her out.

But they're both broke now, they can't go with the carny, so they stay in town and work a gag wherein she distracts the manager of upscale apartment houses by pretending to want to rent, while he uses the distraction to sneak in and peddle junk door to door. In between times, she drives him crazy, pulling off his loose buttons and sewing them back on, darning his socks, and refusing to play.

This is as close as Miss Sidney got to comedy in this period. There is a lot of low-class weepiness going on, of course, as she falls in love with him and his exasperated kindness, but March is slightly miscast, talking out of the side of his mouth and overacting. True, he slings carny lingo fast enough, but he moves wrong, and wears his clothes too well. He's not physically in the part. Compare this with the way he moves in Nothing Sacred; it's clearly a role meant to showcase his versatility, even if Miss Sidney is top billed.