by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago Charles and I ran a 1931 film called Morals
for Women, made by the short-lived Tiffany
studio (it had begun in the late 1920’s as a production company owned by director
John M. Stahl and attempted to crack the ranks of the majors in 1929 — alas,
just as the Depression was hitting and making it difficult for any business, especially one dealing in non-necessities,
to survive) and a pretty obvious knockoff of The Easiest Way, filmed at MGM the same year. Like The
Easiest Way, Morals for Women deals with a
woman from a proletarian background — though in this film she comes to New York
City from a small town instead of living in New York all along — who
essentially makes it in the Big Apple by becoming a rich man’s mistress, then
has to confront the guy from her previous lifestyle who comes back to her and
wants to marry her but still thinks she’s a “good woman” by 1931 standards.
Directed by Mort Blumenstock from a script by Frances Hyland (she’s only
credited with “story” but since no other writer is credited I presume she wrote
the actual screenplay too), it begins with a typically sententious foreword;
“BROADWAY blazes through the cross currents of the breaking dusk. Its night
with the shadows of its menace and cruel sword sweeps down unrelentlessly [sic]
and swiftly on helpless souls, They, who lie before her, with their jewelled
crowns, its night plunders and turns to flee when welcome dawn comes in across
a sleeping sea.” Then we get a stock shot of the New York skyline, after which
we start meeting our principals: “bad girl” Helen Huston (Bessie Love, just two
years after her amazing performance in the 1929 MGM musical The
Broadway Melody), her sugar daddy Van Dyne
(Conway Tearle — who else?) and Paul Cooper, the nice young man who wants to
marry her but still thinks she’s “pure” (John Holland). Before she came to New
York Helen and Paul dated, but decided not to marry when they were both poor
but to wait until they’d become more financially successful. One difference
between this and the Easiest Way
template is that in Morals for Women
Paul Cooper has become more
financially successful — enough to take Helen on a date through various New
York nightclubs, depicted by a Dudley Murphy-style montage sequence in which an
image of them sitting at a table appears in a circle in the middle of the
screen while the rest is divided by diagonal lines into three or four sections
representing the floor shows at the nightclubs they’re going to.
Morals
for Women got mentioned on the Bix
Beiderbecke Web site not long ago because one contributor theorized that Bix
might have played on the soundtrack — which is not entirely impossible (the
film wasn’t released until October 1931, two months after Bix died, but the
recording could have been made months before that) but is highly unlikely. The
montage is accompanied by Maceo Pinkard’s “I’ll Be a Friend ‘With Pleasure’,”
one of the three songs Bix recorded on his last date as a leader (New York,
September 8, 1930), but the version on the soundtrack is by George Olsen’s band
and there’s no evidence of a hot cornet solo (nor is the movie mentioned on the
label of Bix’s record, as is the case with “Deep Down South,” one of the other
songs recorded at that session, whose label proclaims it as being from the 1930
film Pardon My Gun). On the
technical level, Morals for Women
is quite good — Tiffany had considerably higher production standards than most
of the cheap independent studios from the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, and
Blumenstock’s direction (though with that name I can’t help but wonder if he
socked Tiffany’s investors for 25,000 percent of the production budget, made a
deliberately bad movie and then absconded) is full of close-ups and shot-reverse
shot cuts, standard techniques of major-studio productions at the time but ones
the indies usually eschewed because close-ups cost too much to set up and every
time a camera angle got changed, that was “down time” that also cost the
company money. Hyland’s script is also genuinely witty and well constructed,
and it differs from The Easiest Way
in presenting Helen’s proletarian family not as a rock of stability that will be left for her to
fall back on and be renewed after she dumps the man who’s keeping her and the
man who’s in love with her dumps her
in disgust after finding out she’s been That
Kind of Woman. Rather, they’re shown as either incompetents or nags;
Edmund Breese and Emma Dunn play her nagging parents and David Rollins and June
Clyde her conniving brother and sister. The big thing that happens is that she
goes back to her small town for a visit, a guy she knew in New York makes a
slighting comment about her reputation, her brother starts a fight with the
guy, is arrested and fined $1,000, and in order to come up with the money Helen
has to return to her sugar daddy. Then her whole family comes to New York to
see her, taking her by surprise just as she’s about to host a “wild” party
(though like a lot of other 1930’s movies, the party is so decorous the point
seems to be to scare viewers away from the demi-monde by making it look too terminally boring to bother
with) featuring her sugar daddy and several other guests involved in mistress
relationships.
Eventually, of course, traditional morality wins out and she
returns home to that horrible family and to Paul Cooper, who agrees to marry
her even after he learns the truth about her — a happy ending far less powerful
than the bittersweet one of The Easiest Way, a film I haven’t seen for a while but which I’ve
been in mind of recently because two recent Lifetime productions, Sugar
Daddies and Babysitter’s Black
Book, both reminded me of it, not only in
their presentation of young women essentially whoring themselves out to rich
men to get money to advance in the world (in Babysitter’s Black Book they were high-school students turning tricks to get
the money for college; in Sugar Daddies they were college undergraduates becoming mistresses to earn the money
for law school) but in their heroines being torn between their need for, and
enjoyment of, the money they were making from sex with older men and their
guilt feelings about living that way — only in 1931 the writers did a better
job presenting their dilemmas and Constance Bennett, who played the central
character in The Easiest Way, was
far stronger as an actress than either Taylor Gildersleeve in Sugar
Daddies or Spencer Locke in Babysitter’s
Black Book. Still, it’s fascinating that
stories like this (or the current box-office champ, Fifty Shades of
Grey, also about a not-rich young girl
willing essentially to sell herself to a super-rich man for all the kinky and
potentially hurtful things he wants to do with her) are making a major comeback
just now, with the rich getting ever richer, the not-so-rich falling ever
farther behind, and young, attractive women in the 2010’s facing the same
dilemma as their foresisters did in the 1930’s: make presumably “easy” (but
actually quite difficult) money by selling themselves sexually or stay out of
the whole sordid mess and suffer in poverty and unpaid student loan debt
instead. I remember how incensed Molly Ivins was when she broke the story of
women who had gone to business school and got degrees in investment and
finance, but because those professions had heavy-duty glass ceilings and were
as fiercely protective of their testosterone-fueled male-only environments as
the video game industry, they were reduced to prostituting themselves —
literally — for the men working the jobs, and making the fortunes, they had
gone to school in hopes of achieving for themselves. These stories hook so many
nasty social prejudices, including both market worship and sexism, it’s no
wonder they are still being made and, if the evidence of Lifetime’s movie
schedule is to be believed, actually making a comeback!
