Verree Teasdale.

  • First Lady (1937)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2022) As much as it’s easy to lambaste Hollywood for its history of sexism, the record isn’t quite so clear-cut if you accept that female power often manifested itself in ways not necessarily recognizable as feminism. There’s a truly fascinating case to be made that First Lady, for instance, is a case study on hidden power—a film built around a universe in which even first-rate politicians are mere puppets for the ambitions of their wives and potential mates. Adapted from a theatrical play, the film showcases Kay Francis and Verree Teasdale as Washington, DC women maneuvering behind the scenes to ensure that their men end up with their party’s nomination for President. Both the comedy and the drama are slight—at least in appearance. But the fine dialogue makes up for a relatively lack of big effect—much of the screenplay is remarkably sly and biting in its depiction both of power and personal politics. But it’s really the idea that the powerful men are pawns in a bigger Bene Gesserit-scale game that’s the best thing about First Lady—or would be if the film didn’t happen to star the wonderful Francis, doing her best to keep up with the talky script in barely 83 minutes. Watch the film for Francis, stay for the enjoyable portrait of DC wives fighting it out… with the fate of the nation an incidental consequence of whom will best the other.

  • Skyscraper Souls (1932)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2022) I’m not sure you’d call it a subgenre, exactly, but I have a clear fondness for those many Manhattan-set films of the 1930s that represent what was then the height of modernity and sophistication—men and women going from their high-rise apartments to their high-rise jobs, trying to find love, advance their careers and take care of whatever plot point was thrown in their way. It’s a meticulously scrubbed-down fantasy version of 1930s life in Manhattan (notice that we seldom see the characters in the streets, and it’s not just because on-location shooting was impossible), but it’s still incredibly relatable and compelling to any twenty-first century viewer used to the urban lifestyle. The tightly wound Skyscraper Souls is nowhere near the best, funniest or more representative of such movies, but it could be one of the most exemplary ones given how free it is, in its pre-Code glory, to portray a young woman as having valid lustful desires. There’s a slightly techno-thrillerish edge to the setting—a hundred-story tall skyscraper that has everything needed for the plot—so much so that the action never steps out of the building. (One should note, for historical purposes, that the Empire State Building was the first building to feature more than a hundred floors; it opened in 1931 and remained the tallest until the 1960s.)  Much of the plot is about the tall building itself—and the man desperately fighting to keep control of it. Our male protagonist has affairs with other women (!) with his wife’s approval (!!) and causes a stock market crash that is almost presented as a good thing (!!!)  Warren Williams plays the magnificent bastard at the centre of the film, but there’s a lot of good supporting work from players such as Maureen O’Sullivan and Verree Teasdale. (Pre-gossip Hedda Hopper also shows up briefly.)  Even if the plotting gets suspicious or even repellent, I can’t help but like the paean to modernity that is Skyscraper Souls, the sense of a buzzing Manhattan or the Pre-Code slips (and scantily-clad ladies) that, as usual, evoke an entirely different history for American cinema had the Production Code never been as dominant.