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Unashamed, a family drama which spends its second half in a courtroom, is sadly dated. Its tone, theme and morals are thoroughly mixed up.
Helen Twelvetrees plays a rich girl courted by the appropriately named fortune hunter Harry Swift (Monroe Owsley). Twelvetrees' father and brother (Robert Warwick and Robert Young) protest against the relationship, to no avail. Then Swift convinces Twelvetrees to spend a night in a hotel so he can force her father to give in...
A resulting act of violence results in a courtroom battle fought by defender Lewis Stone and prosecutor John Miljan. Only, the movie asks you to root for the lying main characters. The quick, weird feel-good ending doesn't help - it's both unbelievable and celebrates injustice.
I can't recommend this odd relic to other than hardcore film fans.
Unashamed is not available on DVD, but has been broadcast on TCM.
I watched Strange Interlude so you don't have to.
Harsh words for a glossy, high-end 1932 MGM movie, perhaps, but the experimentation in Strange Interlude not only doesn't work, it makes for a downright unpleasant movie watching experience.
Strange Interlude is based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning Eugene O'Neill play that has the following conceit: the audience can hear selected thoughts of selected characters. This method was handled in various ways onstage, including the actors holding face masks. In the MGM movie, character's voices are heard on the soundtrack while the actors keep their mouths closed but go through facial acting gyrations as if they speaking. It doesn't work. Director Robert Z. Leonard seemed to have realized it doesn't work because the technique is used less often as the film progresses. And, does it progress: the movie's only 109 minutes long, but by the end it feels like three hours.
The story is long, convoluted and unbelievable. Norma Shearer plays Nina, pining for a lost, unrequited love who died in WWI. She has an odd relationship with her Sigmund Freud-like father, who exits the film quickly (I suspect his role was larger in the play version). She then ping pongs between Clark Gable as her doctor and lover, Alexander Kirkland as her long suffering husband and Ralph Morgan as a pathetic, lovelorn uncle type. The mechanics of the plot I'll leave to your imagination or, if you plan on watching the film, your discovery.
The original play's length was at least twice as long as the filmed version, a length which, I hope, allowed for more subtlety and complexity. When those essential elements are stripped away from Strange Interlude, what's left is sheer melodrama. Strange Interlude invokes madness and the prospect of more madness as an essential plot device. Given more space and attention, that device could have been more believable (as in Tennessee Williams' Suddenly, Last Summer). Here, it's just an absurdity piled on top of other absurdities.
Despite the fact that the film is pre-code, its reticence also harms it. The ad for the film claimed, "For the first time, you hear the hidden, unspoken thoughts of people!", but these thoughts are sanitized. In the play, Nina aborts the (perceived) mad child she had with her husband, but that act isn't mentioned here. The script for Strange Interlude was written by Bess Meredyth, who'd been writing movies since 1910. Meredyth worked on a lot of good movies, but MGM's Strange Interlude needed a more modern sensibility. (Groucho Marx had it, with writers George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, making fun of Strange Interlude in their stage show and movie, Animal Crackers).
The makeup was also no help. As the characters age, Shearer looks beautiful, but poor Clark Gable looks like he walked out of a coal mine; his makeup is completely unconvincing. The best I can say of the many fine actors involved is they did the best they could with the script they were given. Young Robert Young has an especially thankless role, playing one of the most clueless and dense sons in film history.
Strange Interlude is available on Warner Brothers Archive DVD-R.
A weird downer of a movie (the poster above shows just how weird; Durante's slayed at the end of the film), MGM's adaptation of Upton Sinclair's novel is like a glossy version of a D.W. Griffith preachathon. It's nearly epic in scope (118 minutes), but bogged down by hammed-up acting and a melodramatic script that couldn't have warranted many raves when the film was new.
The Wet Parade begins in the south, where gentleman Lewis Stone slowly drinks himself to death, his last stop a pig sty. When his son, played by Neil Hamilton, moves to the north, the story and his sister, played by Dorothy Jordan, follow him.
There the binge drinking continues in a hotel best described as Alcohol Central.The owner of the hotel, overplayed by Walter Huston, is a non-stop lush and when alcoholic Neil Hamilton moves in, he's right at home. Robert Young, the most naturalistic and fresh actor in the film, plays Huston's teetotalling son.
Things get worse from there: after prohibition is instituted, alcoholics turn to bad liquor purchased from bootleggers. When Huston kills his wife in the throes of this stuff and Neil Hamilton goes blind from it, Young and Jordan dedicate their lives to irradicating bad alcohol from the planet Earth.
Then it gets even more odd: Jimmy Durante, portraying a treasury agent, is beamed into this movie from another planet, playing his role as if he were teamed with Buster Keaton instead of Robert Young. There's a lot of "ha-cha-cha"s and lame jokes while busting bootleggers!
Without having read Sinclair's novel. it's hard to determine if the story is more anti-alcohol or anti-government intervention (it could be both). Both are shown as very, very bad. Sinclair's politics banned him from the MGM lot when the film was being made, and he wasn't allowed to speak at the film's premiere (though the audience was expecting it). That's cold.
The one scene in the film that really works (and is probably straight from the novel) methodically and with no dialogue shows an assembly line of criminals packaging alcohol unfit for drinking as if it were name brand product. With the exception of this scene, Victor Fleming's direction is rote stuff.
Side note: The film ironically shows footage of Woodrow Wilson signing the 18th amendment into law, when Wilson had actually vetoed the act (thanks for this info, Mary).
The film also features Clara Blandick, Myrna Loy in a small part and Max Davidson in a short, uncredited role. MGM missed the boat in not fully utilizing his talents.
An amusing review of The Wet Parade on Booze Movies.com: http://www.boozemovies.com/2007/07/wet-parade-1932.html
The Wet Parade is not available on DVD or VHS, but has been broadcast on Turner Classic Movies.
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