Ten Favorite Pre-Code Love Scenes

Well it's the end of a decade folks so all the movie blogs are bound to have a lot of lists. Since I have barely watched ten movies from this decade (if I didn't exaggerate, I would die) I will focus on stuff I'm actually watching. You know: old movies. So here's my Ten Favorite Pre-Code Love Scenes to keep you heated up on this cold winter's day.


10)Gary Cooper and Cary Grant in Uniform. And if that's not enough...submarines! Gary Cooper has many great pre-code love scenes: The scene at the end of One Sunday Afternoon where he in a matter of a few minutes saves his marriage and wins the audience's grudging affection. Not to mention scenes in Farewell to Arms where he makes you forget momentarily that the script has left Hemingway behind pages ago. But none of these scenes are really all that different from Gary Cooper love scenes after the code. A big exception is to be found in the oddball melodrama Devil and the Deep co-starring Tellulah Bankhead, Charles Laughton and a little known (at the time) actor named Cary Grant. Cooper picks Bankhead up, literally, he saves her from keeling over in the midst of a festival, and spends the night with her in an oasis. The scene lasts ten or eleven minutes following the couple as they move through crowded streets, back-alley bazaars and eventually the moonlit dessert. At one point she's trying to get rid of him and she shakes his hand to say goodbye, he keeps it and continues talking to her in a low monotone of hypnotic seduction while stroking the inside of her wrist with his forefinger. It's a completely cheeky thing which would get a mere mortal slapped, if he didn't look like Gary Cooper. Bankhead plays into it beautifully, protesting half-heartedly until it's too late. The rest of the film is campy good fun that ends in a submarine crash in which everyone gets wet (except Cary Grant, who sadly left the movie before this point, D'oh!)

9) Cheap and Vulgar. Warren William and Joan Blondell in The Goldiggers of 1933. Joan Blondell calls herself "Cheap and vulgar Carol" and Warren William replies "I love you, whatever your name is." It's really pretty awesome. See it here. More on Golddigers here.

8)Put em round me. Norma Shearer and Clark Gable in a Free Soul. This whole scene is the essence of pre-code from the costumes (Norma Shearer's loose, low cut dressing gown worn without underwear would never be permitted a few years later) to the context (the scene takes place as the couple are spending the night in Ace's hideaway.) Gable and Shearer argue. He wants to marry and she doesn't. She ends the dialog and the argument with a direct command for some lovin. "Come on. Put 'em round me." A contemporary review of the film found this couple preposterous, but now they are almost cliche--the gangster bad boy and the wild, society girl. The whole scene is linked here, and starts at about the three minute mark. More on A Free Soul can be found here.

7)The pussyfooting. Barbara Stanwyck and James Rennie discuss the ups and downs of shacking up together in Illicit. "I can't stand all this pussy-footing around," he declares to which she replies, "Don't say you don't like the pussy-footing." Stanwyck is adorable and hilarious and Rennie has stuck with me, even though this is the only movie I've ever seen him in. The combination of romance, comedy and a head-strong heroine mixed in this scene would be repeated frequently in Stanwyck's best pictures. Highlights are linked here and begins around the 55 second mark. More about Illicit can be found here.

6) Jungle love. Four Frightened People. Herbert Marshall and Claudette Colbert lose their clothes and, eventually, their inhibitions as they lose their way in the jungle. After epic quantities of flirtation, he touches her shoulder. She tells him that it feels so good when he touches her and he replies "everything I've touched for weeks now has seemed to be you." Squeeeeee! Later in the film the lovers, exchange wedding vows while tied back to back to a piece of bamboo. Marshall's character has a wife back home which adds an extra level of pre-code angst to the proceedings. More about Four Frightened People here.

5) I'm gonna let you watch me shave. In Bed of Roses (1933), Joel McCrea plays a gritty ship's captain who falls for a prostitute (Constance Bennet). The whole thing is a bit of Red Dust rip off in that respect, but it's a fun movie, with well-written dialogue and enormous chemistry between the leads in their third pairing on film. In one scene McCrea's character shaves in front of Bennett and things get pretty steamy. I happened upon this movie in the last five minutes and I was completely mesmerized by McCrea and Bennett, so much so that I made a point to seek out the whole film and others with these two actors. McCrea is ridiculously handsome in this movie. I'd been used to seeing his films from the early Forties, where he was pretty, but wow. OK, just... wow. Fan of Palm Beach Story? Watch one of his pre-code comedies with Bennett and prepare to have your mind blown.

4) They are still talking about typewriters, right? Leave it to Lubitsch to make even an old typewriter sexy. In Design for Living Frederich March and Glinda admit there feelings for one another and then move on to more important matters--talking about Tommy's old typewriter. Him: "Ya didn't keep it oiled! The keys are rusty." Her, "It still rings." He moves really close to her and she whispers, "it still rings." See the whole scene here starting at around minute 54.

3)Garbo and the furniture In Queen Christina Garbo and her real-life lover John Gilbert act out the doomed love affair between a queen dressed as a man and her Spanish lover, Antononio. They spend three days together snow bound in an inn. In one memorable scene Garbo moves around the room touching the furniture and draperies with a sensual delight. She explains to Anotonio "in the future in my memory I shall live a great deal in this room." See the whole scene here.

2) What about breakfast? In The Smiling Lieutenant, Claudette Colbert and Maurice Chevalier discuss when they will next see each other. She suggests dinner, but he says no that's too long to wait he is hungry now. Then she suggests tea and he says, knowingly, what about breakfast? As she's leaving, they kiss and the screen fades to black. In the next scene she is happily cooking him breakfast. And that, ladies and gentleman is why they call it the Lubitsch touch! See the whole thing here, from the five minute mark.

1)UNF. If you don't know what UNF is try looking it up and you might just find a scene from Red Dust there as an explanation. The rather crude acronym has come to mean"paradigm of sexiness" and that about says it all really. It's hard to pick just one scene from Red Dust. One might do a list of at least five just from that film. My favorite is the first meeting of the couple in which they mostly debate the merits of different kinds of cheese. It's almost as if the writers were trying to come up with the least sexy dialog possible, but Gable and Harlow somehow set it on fire anyway. See it here.

Capra and Stanwyck

Barbara Stanwyck was to Frank Capra in the early thirties almost what Marlene Dierich was to Eric Von Stroheim in that same era. She was a muse. You can see this in their earliest pictures Forbidden (reviewed here), Ladies of Leisure and The Miracle Woman. In Ladies of Leisure, Stanwyck plays a "party girl" the sort of borderline prostitute without the sex that Holly GoLighly worked in Breakfast at Tiffany's. She meets a nice rich boy, Jerry Strong (Ralph Graves) while escaping an attempted date rape on a yacht and though she lifts his wallet, he hires her to be his artist's model. The plot give Capra the excuse to have dozens of loving close-ups of his star. His camera captures the mixture of worldliness and other worldly beauty that Stanwyck had. She resembles those romanticized Art Noveau Indian maidens that graced beer advertisements at the turn of the Twentieth century.

Ladies of Leisure has a breezy, morality all its own that was typical of the pre-code period. It's not a great film, but Stanwyck is always watchable, and no less so in a film that's all about a man watching a woman while the audience waits for him to realize that he's in love with her.

I don't think Capra was terribly interested in the type of film making where he spent hours on elaborate lighting set ups to present his starlet like a beautiful bug in amber, as the afore-mentioned von Stroheim. Those kind of movies were getting stale even in 1930. He was much more interested in the blend of social commentary and comedy which he managed to pull off in The Miracle Woman. And because his star was playing a tent revival evangelist, she got to wear flowing white robes, one night and a hoochy mama gold lame band uniform the next. Bonus!

The Miracle Woman is one of the best early Stanwyck films with a good script and nice chemistry between Stanwyck and co-star David Manners. Manners plays a blind man whose life is saved by one of Stanwyck's sermons. After he comes onstage and takes the part of one of her usually pre-paid patsies, he helps her get her life back on track. One of the more memorable aspects of the movie is the fact that Manners' character relates most of his emotions to Stanwyck via a ventriloquist dummy. He somehow manages to make this less creepy than it sounds.

The denouement of The Miracle Woman was audacious even for Frank Capra who never had any trouble putting spirituality on film. When Stanwyck's revival tent complex burns down Manners fumbles through the smoke to rescue her in a heavily-implied miracle. For a movie that spends most of its time mercilessly satirizing both conventional organized religion and evangelism, this is a pretty strong statement about true faith. Stanwyck, with her dual quality of worldliness and inner beauty was the perfect actress to help him make that statement.

A Song is Born

I've had A Song is Born (1948) in my tivo queue for more than a year. I don't know why I've overlooked watching it till now. I recorded it because it was a young Danny Kaye movie and I've always loved young Danny Kaye. I started watching it, with my usual twenty minute rule--if a movie doesn't hook me in that time, I turn it off. In the first twenty seconds I was intrigued because it looked like it was filmed on the Ball of Fire (1941) set. It took me another ten minutes or so to realize that A Song is Born is a technicolor musical remake of Ball of Fire, my favorite Gary Cooper movie. It was directed by Howard Hawks who made the original as well.

The script sticks very close to the original except that instead of creating a general encyclopedia, the professors are working on a complete history of music with a set of reference recordings. One of the professors is played by Benny Goodman and the group of musicians who drop by to help with the project are a who's who of Big Band Jazz. In one scene Goodman sits in on a jam session, pretending to know nothing about jazz. Lionel Hampton tells him that they all play without sheet music, just like Benny Goodman, to which the professor replies, "Never heard of him."

Danny Kaye and Virgina Mayo play the parts made immortal by Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck. Mayo has that breezy, sexy way of singing and relating to the older professors that makes the movie crackle and kaye is adorable as usual. Kaye gets an added scene of typical nonsense. After he realizes he's in love with Miss Honey he eats breakfast, stirring jam in his coffee with a dill pickle, putting mustard on cake, etc. Happily its a short scene. As brilliantly funny as he is, he never seems to know when to end a gag.

Though the script sticks close to the original, some of the dialog is mangled in a Song is Born. Some scenes have been updated or cut down to make room for the musical numbers while later references are in tact from the original script. This would be a bit confusing if you hadn't practically had the original memorized as I do. You can see why they decided to remake this a musical. It makes sense since the fugitive from justice is a nightclub singer and the original has a very memorable musical sequence "Drum Boogie" which feature Gene Krupa on the matchbox.

Even though I think the story flows a bit better in the musical version, I still prefer Ball of Fire. Cooper and Stanwyck have amazing chemistry and the love scenes in A Song is Born are a bit flat in comparison. I found myself anxiously waiting for the next musical set piece rather than enjoying the romantic interaction between Honey and the Professor. Perhaps the problem is that in original, Cooper was playing against type and in the remake Danny Kaye is more or less playing Danny Kaye. Which is more romantic, finding Gary Cooper buried away under layers of dust in old mansion or finding Danny Kaye in the same circumstance?

You Belong to Me: Almost as good as the real thing.

Sometimes a knock-off can almost as good as the real thing. Take those fake purses you can get everywhere. Everyone assumes if you are carrying a Louis Vitton bag that it is a fake (unless you are Sarah Palin's seven year old daughter) so you might as well buy the fake. In 1941, that's what Columbia pictures did with You Belong to Me a slight marriage comedy built entirely on the success of The Lady Eve and pumped it out only a few months later. It was an unfortunate fact of history that The Lady Eve was so popular that it was still playing in theaters when this movie came out. Still, The New York Times gave it a decent review because You Belong to Me is actually very funny and well-made. It's like opening up that fake purse and finding that bootleggers have gone to work on the inside too, making the thing work as well as the genuine article.

The story of You Belong to Me revolves around a lady doctor who falls in love with one of her patients. (I guess this is lady doctor week, eh? Stanwyck's Dr. Helen Hunt is another clothes horse lady doctor, a chip off Mary Stevens block.) The initial conceit of Fonda pretending to be sicker than he really is, gets old pretty fast. All great comedies know when to retire a joke and move on to the next as this one does. The movie really gets going in the second act after the wedding when Fonda becomes insanely jealous of Stanwyck's male patients. In his defense they are all ludicrously good-looking and have names like "Oily" and "Van."

It all winds up in a glorious mess with Fonda bursting into a party in a hat with branches coming out both sides, like antlers. I won't bother to take you through the succession of improbable misunderstandings that got us to such a gloriously wacky moment, but it's nice to know that such a moment exists. Fonda plays it to the hilt and Stanwyck plays it with a real, cool anger. On the car ride home she says in a her best Double Indemnity voice, "take those antlers off before someone takes a shot at ya."

It's enough that we just love both these stars and we love them together a lot. In that respect, You Belong to Me is the real deal. I think of My Favorite Wife, a movie that's very derivative of The Awful Truth but in many way almost as enjoyable because the thing we love most about the original movie is screen couple that carries it. Fonda and Stanwyck were together in Miss Manton (1938), The Lady Eve and finally You Belong to Me. The final movie, has the benefit of the experience of the previous two.

Apart from the charm of the leads, the movie was directed by capable Westley Ruggles (brother of Charlie) who was a veteran of several Mae West and Claudette Colbert Paramount comedies in the previous decade. The script was adapted by Claude Binyon, a frequent collaborator with Ruggles from a story by Dalton Trumbo. All this one still wouldn't be enough to make a great romantic comedy without a good supporting cast. Edgar Buchanon (perpetual side-kick from films like Penny Serenade and the Talk of the Town); Melville Cooper (also in The Lady Eve but best known to me as Mr. Collins from the original Pride and Prejudice); and Ruth Donnelly (Emma Hopper in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) all have big, juicy parts in this movie.

Pre-code Stanwyck and the opening of the Media Room

Barbara Stanwyck in Frank Capra's Forbidden (1932).

In addition to talking about Barbara Stanwyck's pre-code career, I'd also like to announce the opening of the Cinema OCD Media Room. I decided to start a second blog for shorter reviews of films and books about films. It is getting to the point where I feel like my posts are too long and I don't have enough time to get into the particulars if I'm talking about more than a couple of movies. So after you finish reading about Stanwyck's pre-code career, please check out the Media Room.

I first came to love Barbara Stanwyck in Ball of Fire. She was tough talking, funny, sexy and not afraid to make a straight forward play for the guy she wants. What I didn't realize that dance hall girl Sugar Puss O'Shea, from Ball of Fire was a comic parody of the types of roles Stanwyck was first famous for in her pre-code career. Barbara Stanwyck was one of the many stage actors recruited to act in the newly developed talking pictures. She went west with her husband a vaudeville actor who was testing at Columbia Pictures. Barbara tested as well and got a non-exclusive deal with the studio. She made her first talkie The Locked Room (1929). She played a woman who tries to take her fall for her husband on a murder charge. She played a working class girl, who marries well. This would be a pattern for Barbara over the next five years. She almost always played a character from a humble background who rises either through her own wits and talents, through marriage or by hooking up with the right men. Her characters were almost always street wise and tough-talking, a bit like Sugar Puss but perhaps not quite as funny.

Check out reviews of The Locked Door, Illicit, Night Nurse, Forbidden, Shopworn, The Bitter Tea of General Yen and Baby Face in the media room. There will be at least two more reviews in the days to come so stay tuned.