Director: George Archainbaud
An infamous gambler steals the identity of a minister in Shooting Straight, an intense crime drama featuring a terrific performance by Richard Dix. As a tough guy, Dix is ruthless, but only when he needs to be–his interest is in the love of the game, with the dark underbelly of the gambling world being an unfortunate byproduct of his lifestyle. The screenplay by J. Walter Ruben takes a special interest in the hypocrisy of moralizing religious reformers–there are numerous scenes of Dix, posing as the minister, parading through a hall of gamblers before joining in on the games himself. As with many crime pictures of the period, the line separating hero and villain is a thin one. In the climax, a chaotically violent bare knuckle brawl breaks out–chairs are thrown, mirrors are broken–and director George Archainbaud and cinematographer Edward Cronjager stage the sequence with a few innovative overhead angles that memorably add to the intensity of the fight.
Director: George Archainbaud
A melodrama told with impressive efficiency, Three Who Loved stars Betty Compson as Helga, an immigrant from Sweden who intends to marry bank teller and aspiring lawyer John (Conrad Nagel). Her fiancé is so busy studying to pass the bar exam, however, that his best friend Phil (Robert Ames) earns Helga’s affections right under John’s nose. Phil is sent to prison after John steals money from his drawer at work, while John and Helga live freely but trapped in a loveless marriage–he, wrecked with guilt; she, longing for the man who has been incarcerated. Director George Archainbaud was hit-or-miss in this period (his previous collaboration with Compson, The Lady Refuses, is mostly a dud), but here he impressively stages the drama and works in a number of stylistic flourishes, such as the motif of the protective bars at the bank anticipating both the literal jail cell and each character’s own psychological constraints. Nagel, not usually a particularly exciting screen presence, is very good as the ambitious but rather dull young man who is eventually destroyed by his conscious, while Compson tries to fight against the terrible accent she’s saddled with. The most memorable performer is Ames, who would tragically die of apparent alcohol poisoning just months after the film’s release–he’s a heel, but he does earn the audience’s sympathy both in his apparent genuine affection for Compson early on and in the scene in which he is wrongly convicted.
Director: George Archainbaud
Silent star Betty Compson was quite busy in the early days of sound–the rare actress to make the transition gracefully, even if her success was short-lived. The Lady Refuses sees her cast as a lady of the night who finds refuge in the home of a lonely upperclass gentleman (Gilbert Emery). He wishes to stand in the way of his son’s (John Darrow) marriage to a gold-digger (Margaret Livingston) and so he enlists Compson’s alluring talents to pull him away from his bride-to-be. An unlikely love triangle between Compson, Emery, and Darrow emerges late in the picture, with the former relationship coming off as particularly nonsensical–the stuffy Emery is sexless and passionless in his scenes with Compson, spending much of his time on screen with her doing little else but brooding pathetically. Director George Archainbaud’s production is mostly workmanlike at best, but he does stage a memorable opening sequence in which Compson hurries through a dense London fog to evade the policemen pursuing her (the moody visuals are credited to Leo Tover, highly accomplished as a cinematographer later in the 1940s and 50s). Compson is passable even if one wishes it was Joan Blondell in the part, while Darrow’s flamboyant performance as a playboy is likable.
Director: George Archainbaud
A documentary-like sequence that captures the process of bringing salmon from their habitat into consumer cans is the centerpiece of The Silver Horde, an early talkie that becomes quite the lark in its latter half. Joel McCrea, then only 25-years-old, is paired with Jean Arthur in their first of three collaborations (the last of which being a masterpiece of the 1940s, The More the Merrier), however it is his relationship with silent screen star Evelyn Brent that captivates. Brent, most known today for working with Josef von Sternberg in The Last Command and Underworld, worked with relative consistency from the silent era through the 1950s, however her career never quite flourished as much as it should have given the promise of her early work. Here, she’s not met with a good script or a patient director – many of the proceedings feel like rehearsal footage, with McCrea coming off as particularly stilted – however she has a memorable scene in which she confronts Arthur in the heated climax. When it is revealed that she is a prostitute halfway through the picture, one expects that she will eventually redeem herself but ultimately take the backseat to Arthur as McCrea’s lover. Even though women’s roles in the pre-Code era were much richer than they would be in later years, the scripts too often failed their characters in the end by regressing them back into subservient accessories (Michael Curtiz’s Female being a key example). It is a great surprise, then, that McCrea finds himself still drawn to Brent despite her past. Just as the picture is fascinated with the workers at a salmon trapping factory, it equally holds Brent in high esteem, suggesting that prostitution is no less blue collar than what McCrea does.
Director: George Archainbaud
As Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo did before her in Dishonored and Mata Hari respectively, Constance Bennett was cast as a spy who falls in love with her enemy in George Archainbaud’s After Tonight. Her on-screen lover and future husband is Gilbert Roland, equally miscast as an Austrian agent. Bennett is fit for the part while her character is undercover – she inhabits a number of standby roles given to women at the time, including work as a singer, a nurse, and a seamstress. As the sophisticated veteran spy, however, she never quite excels despite a number of tedious scenes in which she writes in invisible ink and smuggles books to-and-fro. The highlight of the picture is a cabaret rendition of Val Burton & Will Jason’s “Buy a Kiss” that Bennett performs in a sleek black dress. Mordaunt Hall, critic for the New York Times, was cold on the picture at its release despite acknowledging some of its escapist pleasures, calling it a “synthetic conception of espionage and contra espionage […] but even so, it is quite welcome after the plethora of gangster yarns and those persistent backstage chronicles.”
Director: George Archainbaud
A fascinating, thoroughly cynical aviation thriller from director George Archainbaud, The Lost Squadron stars the impressive ensemble of Richard Dix, Robert Armstrong, and Joel McCrea as pilots who find jobs after the war as stunt fliers for a tyrannical Hollywood director played by Erich von Stroheim. Like I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang did so memorably the same year, the picture bluntly criticizes the poor treatment of war veterans with great impact. In particular, Robert Armstrong plays a drunk whose vice is explored without condescension – one might consider the presentation of his character as being a precursor to The Lost Weekend, given that at the time drunks in Hollywood were still more often depicted with broad humor by comedic talents like Frank McHugh or Guy Kibbee. The cruel ironies that the only work that the pilots can find is as stunt-fliers and, in a late twist, that a war veteran is faced head-on with the consequences of a murder, pack just enough bitterness that the film’s anti-war message resonates strongly. On an unrelated note, fans of the pre-Code era should take some delight in a surprising moment in which one pilot gives the middle finger to another.
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