ilprofessore-1

This 1937 Columbia Pictures feature stars Virginia Bruce as the call girl (read hooker) with a heart of gold who falls in love with a rich guy. It's a part many of her contemporaries played and she does more than a decent job with it. The film is a remake of a remake, the nearest predecessor being Frank Capra's superb 1930 version of the story that made a star of Barbara Stanwyck. Bruce is a fine actress, but Barbara makes much more of the part, thanks in no small part to what you could say and do in those pre-Code days. The 1937 sanitized version palls in comparison, partly because it is only staged competently without Capra's flair by Gordon Wiles, a former art director like Mitch Leisen who directed. Melvin Douglas plays the rich boy/ painter to perfection, and is supported by a first rate cast: Reginald Dennis as the playboy drunk and others. Seeing Pert Kelton as the wise cracking, cynical gold digging roommate reminds us why she was Jackie Gleason's first choice for Alice Kramden.

Robert Siodmak (1900-1973) was a member of a group of talented twenty-year-olds, all film fans in Berlin, who made the extremely popular German silent film PEOPLE ON SUNDAY (Menschen am Sonntag) in 1929. Siodmak co-directed the film with Edward Ulmer from a script by Billy Wilder and Siodmak's brother Curt. Fred Zimmerman was the assistant camera. When Hitler came to power a few years later, all five were forced to leave their country, in time ending up in Hollywood where all five became directors. Siodmak, perhaps best remembered today for a series of excellent film noirs, is one of the most neglected of the emigre directors, contantly working all over the world, doing every sort of script that came his way from THE KILLERS with Burt Lancaster and the young Ava Gardner to the pirate takeoff THE CRIMSON PIRATE to COBRA WOMAN with Maria Montez. This sentimental tale made at low-budget Republic Pictures in 1943 (but not looking it) is equally well-staged and photographed with a wonderful performance by character actress Mabel Paige as the old lady who befriends a gifted cast that includes young Peter Lawford, the beautiful ingenue Dorothy Morris, and John Craven who had been the original husband in OUR TOWN on Broadway. Siodmak, much like his contemporary, the Hungarian Michael Curtiz, was one of those always-working contract directors who seemed to be able to direct anything and anyone that any studio handed him; especially good with actors, many of his performers were nominated for Oscars. He is unjustly forgotten these days in most books that glorify the golden age of studio product. A master craftsman.

This Paramount Picture, a tough girl/tough boy romance acted expertly by Fredrick March and Sylvia Sydney was made in 1934, the final year before the code came into effect. Typical of many a Pre-Code picture of the time, it is packed with sleazy unglamorous characters who go unpunished. Not much else to recommend it other than the occasional snappy dialogue, the chemistry between the two handsome leads, and some early Carnival scenes photogaphed by Leon Shamroy before his glossier Twentieth Century Fox days. March, usually the debonair leaving man is cast against type here, playing the sort of role that was to make Jimmy Cagney famous, and Sydney is lovely, vulnerable, and adorable. Once the Code was imposed, stories like this about the seamier side of life stopped being made. This minor film is a document then of how some people survived during Depression days. For that alone, it's worth watching.