Westward Passage (1932)

(On Cable TV, December 2022) By this time in my film education, I’m such a fan of 1930s Hollywood that I’m a good audience even for mediocre films—I can overlook many problems if the film is charming, and it takes a lot for me to go to “Wait, this is terrible!”  But “a lot” is not impossible to meet, and while Westward Passage begins with a cute sequence in which newlyweds (Ann Harding and Laurence Olivier) encounter a cranky rural inn owner (ZaSu Pitts), the rest of the film sinks fast into sheer loathing. Almost all of the film’s problems go back to the protagonist played by Olivier, a horrible pompous excuse for a writer who callously abandons his wife and child in order to pursue his ambitions. After the charming first sequence (albeit one that does heavily suggest his terrible personality), the film sinks lower and lower in horrifying plot points. They divorce, but he keeps hounding her (and his estranged daughter, even if she has remarried a much better man) years later, until we’re meant to believe that they get back together and this is a happy conclusion of sorts. No. NO. He’s awful and she’s an idiot and whoever brought this thing to the screen should be posthumously ashamed of what they’ve done. Awful dialogue and a lack of panache in Olivier’s delivery do nothing to make his character any more sympathetic—if you turn off the movie in the early scene in which he acts like a petulant child for being unable to sell his writing, you’re making the right choice because it doesn’t get any better after that. But wait, there’s more! Racism and waffling await, with the waffling from the female lead character being probably worse given that it leads to a conclusion that no viewer will believe or like. I rarely go off on 1930s movies like that, but trust me: Westward Passage is worth the venting. Absent Olivier, I doubt it would be remembered at all.