That Old Feeling: Three Ladies to Talk About

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This is pure Southern Gothic, with the veiled threats of twisted, inbred country folk; the movie moves at a languid Southern pace, and with the emotional humidity of a distant land drenched in tropical tradition. It is photographed in glamorous monochrome that mixes black and white and all pearly shades in between. As Hopkins sashays through a dark house, there’s enough glint off her satin dress to blind a teamster. Under Stephen Roberts’ direction, Hopkins both glamorizes and unmasks the genteel duplicity of the Mississippi plutocracy. She is so gorgeous, we think, that she almost deserves to get away with her artful shams. Yet she is so reckless that we know she won’t.

Then Trigger creeps in, and "The Story of Temple Drake" reveals itself as a horror movie. And Trigger is Dracula. When this night creature has to make a getaway from a room, he pushes back a curtain and virtually flies out the window; he enters the barn from another window (are doors his mirrors?) before raping Temple. For the once-blithe belle, sex is an intoxication (she does stay with him) and an infection. She looks dazed, like Dracula’s conquest Lucy, or drugged by Trigger’s heavy-lidded, narcotic sexuality. The film ends in a courtroom scene that shakes Temple out of her erotic stupor and, while it’s at it, upends character logic. But Hopkins makes it emotionally plausible by her beauty and wan ferocity.

KAY FRANCIS
She was notorious for her inability to pronounce the letter "r"; it became Elmer-Fudded into a "w," and Warner’s supposedly instructed its writers to devise dialogue for her that would be innocent of that wascawwy wetter. But Fwancis — sowwy, Francis — had a serene, almost mournful beauty that mesmerized the viewer’s glance and put plugs in his ears. For evidence, see her with William Powell in the 1932 "One Way Passage," as gay and grave a shipboard romance as anyone could pack into 67 minutes.

She’s lighter, at first, in "Girls About Town" one of George Cukor’s first solo films in a distinguished directorial career. She and Lilyan Tashman play Wanda and Marie, two of the trophies in an escort service that charges rich rubes a bundle for an evening in the company of lovely females. The idea is to get money out of the men without having to invite them home. ("Is this where you live?" one eager gent asks Marie outside her apartment building. "Well," she coyly replies, "I only live in some of it.") It’s hard work — as Wanda gripes, "I’ve got a callous on my knee from my boyfriend’s subtle approach" — but in its way rewarding; late one night Marie literally caresses herself to sleep with the $500 check she’s received for a night’s toil. And it’s not as if the ladies aren’t aware of the risks involved. "Are you taking two dinner dresses?" asks Marie before the two go on a yachting weekend. "Yes," Wanda replies, "and a suit of armor."

Like many pre-Code movies, "Girls About Town" frontloads sly gags and easy living, saving the sentiment and melodrama for later. So on the weekend cruise Wanda finds a soft spot for stuffy but handsome Joel McCrea. They pretend to fall in love and, dammit, she does. "Do you know what’s eating me?" she asks him with dreamy resignation. "You. Your teeth are in my heart. And it bites. Hard." She has fallen into the standard romantic plot: set the lovers up (Act 1), tear ‘em apart (Act 2), get 'em back together again (Act 3). What makes the movie unusual is Act 2: it’s revealed that Wanda has been married to a cad who blackmails McCrea. Says this disillusioned nice guy, "I just lost 10 thousand, and my faith in women." Don’t worry: he’ll get both back, in a climax that mixes concupiscence with capitalism. It’s a lovely showpiece for Tashman, the sassy blonde who died, three years later, at 34, and especially for Francis, who could turn any "row" of spectators into a "wow."

NORMA SHEARER
"No one did lust on screen like Norma Shearer," La Salle writes. "She was the complete lady, completely on fire." Well, the whole point of movie allure is to have the figures on screen seduce the figures in the audience. And even critics — especially critics — can fall in love. LaSalle fell for Shearer and made it his mission to rescue her from the genteel obscurity of her later great-lady roles and her off-screen fame as Thalberg’s wife.

Shearer takes some getting used to. She acts by striding about, arms akimbo to suggest self-confidence. She relies on the extravagant gestures of silent dramaturgy, running her hands through her hair, clutching the bust of her Adrian gown in an attitude of agony. There’s also something proper, wifely, downright Canadian (she was from Quebec) about her demeanor. But she leavened this with a swank look, the swan-neck posture that signaled social ease at the time, and a natural vivacity that make whatever her characters did not only understandable but sympathetic. And for all her ladylike airs, she was a tiger when the camera rolled. "Damn," said the young Clark Gable, who shared the screen with her in "A Free Soul," "the dame doesn’t wear any underwear in her scenes."

In Clarence Brown’s "A Free Soul," Shearer is Jan Ashe, the bonne-vivante daughter of a famous defense attorney. She smokes and drinks and engages in brittle chatter, laughing through it all as if men, love, life were sports in which she was the Olympic medallist. "I’m a new kind of woman," she boasts, "in a new kind of world." When she gets involved with gangster Ace Wilfong (Gable), she keeps control of the courtship scenario. "I’m telling you..." says Gable, a gorilla in a tux, and she interrupts him with "Oh, no, you’re not. Nobody is." Then the boss decides she wants to play: she holds her arms out to Ace and says, "Put 'em around me." He eagerly, obediently does.

The code of pre-Code obliges Jan to dally with Ace and then see into his true brutality and renounce him ("Only swine should travel with swine"). Then she must find safe haven in the arms of her sweet, polo-playing fiancé (Leslie Howard), offering apologies and self-recriminations ("I love you as much as I despise myself — and that’s an awful lot"). For good measure, the movie should climax in lurid revelations, stunning reversals and a lawyer’s summation that ends in death. But Shearer’s grounded buoyancy carries the plot through its silliness and seizures. "If I fall and get hurt,’ Jan says, "I’ll pick myself up again." Shearer picks the movie up and carries it with her.

Shearer won an Oscar the year before, in Robert Z. Leonard’s "The Divorcee," a film that not only embodies but helped to establish the code of pre-Code. Shearer plays Jerry, a man’s woman with a man’s name. All the fellas love her. "You’re a great girl, and you’ve got a man’s point of view,’ says one swain (who is so brokenhearted when she announces her engagement to another that he gets drunk, crashes his car and, in remorse, marries a girl who was injured in the crash!). She marries Ted (Chester Morris), a newspaperman with a snappy line of patter and a healthy libido; she can match him in both categories. "I’d like to make love to you till you scream for help," he says; Jerry puts her hand to her throat and whispers, "Can’t scream."

Three years into the marriage, Ideal Wife finds out that Ideal Husband has had quickie affair. Her response: she spends a night in bed with their best friend, and doesn’t keep it a secret: "I’ve balanced our accounts," she says to her astonished spouse. If a man can, why can’t a woman? Hell, she’ll take on the world. "From now on," she tells Ted, "you’re the only man in the world that my door is closed to. And so she rides the social and sexual carousel, capriciously sending mixed signals to the men who would conquer her. This good-time gal pushes men away while flashing a come-hither look; they have to decide whether the light in her eyes is red or green. Jerry-Shearer is still all-lady; can she be a part"time tramp?

In its depiction of a smart woman using her wiles to dazzle the swains who toss their hearts at her feet like quoits, "The Divorcee" offers a pungent metaphor for the art of acting: a pretense of glamour masking ferocious craft. (In dozens of these films, "working women" are caught yawning or snickering out of their johns’ sight.) And in its pitting of a single woman opposite many men, the movie is an ode to star quality of the female species.

The people who made these movies — the men who directed them and the women who, in many cases, helped write them — knew that audiences liked to look at women behaving smartly. Seventy years later, how smart these women and their films still look. And, sadly, how much smarter than today’s.