THE PERILS OF PAULINE (1947)

Betty Hutton and John Lund

THE PERILS OF PAULINE (1947). Director: George Marshall.

Pearl White (Betty Hutton) leaps from a factory job into "show business" when she joins a traveling theater company with the help of a dowager named Julia (Constance Collier). Tired of her mistreatment by the dreamy head of the troupe, Michael Farrington (John Lund of No Man of Her Own), she walks off and finds herself in silent pictures, becoming the great and wealthy serial heroine of The Perils of Pauline and others. But when she offers Michael a job as her leading man will it lead to lasting love for the couple or just disaster? The Perils of Pauline is very loosely based on the life of Pearl White, which actually had enough drama in it without the screenwriter's inventions. Hutton, never one of my favorites, is excellent, however, and she gets good support from Lund (playing a truly obnoxious character whose good looks only make slightly more palatable), Collier [Rope], Billy De Wolfe, and William Demarest as a film director. Songs by Frank Loesser [The Most Happy Fella] include "Rumble," "I Wish I Didn't Love You So," and "Papa Don't Preach." In real life serials were made very quickly, but in this the filming of The Perils of Pauline stretches out for years and years!

Verdict: Hutton in fine form and an entertaining biopic, if mostly balderdash. ***.

GIRLS' DORMITORY

Simone Simon and Herbert Marshall

GIRLS' DORMITORY (1936). Irving Cummings.

"A boy who is graduating is just a boy, but a girl who is graduating stands before you a full-fledged woman."

Professor Anna Mathe (Ruth Chatterton) has been helping Dr. Stephen Dominik (Herbert Marshall), director of a girl's school, with a book project, and is secretly carrying a torch for him. She gets unexpected competition from Marie Claudel (Simone Simon), a pretty 19-year-old student at the school, who is also in love with the middle-aged Professor Dominik. When Professor Augusta Wimmer (Constance Collier, in a most unsympathetic role) finds a love letter Marie wrote to an unknown man in a waste basket, she convenes a council to determine if Marie should graduate. Wimmer and another male professor think her behavior -- they believe she had a rendezvous with this man -- is scandalous and brings disfavor to the school, while two other professors think they are making too much of a school girl's infatuation. As one of them puts it, "my mother was married and had two children at Marie's age." Anna and Stephen are both sympathetic to the girl. The simple story is okay, but it's the acting from all concerned, especially Simon [in her first American film] and Marshall, that put this over. [Not to give away the ending, but if this movie has a moral it's that men like 'em young.] Chatterton (Dodsworth) is not photographed at all flatteringly in this, but her warm, self-sacrificing character is not meant to be glamorous. Tyrone Power shows up very late in the picture as Marie's handsome cousin. John Qualen is a likable if rather outspoken hand around the school, and others in the cast include J. Edward Bromberg and Dixie Dunbar.

Verdict: So-so romance with good performances. **1/2.  

ROPE

ROPE (1948). Director: Alfred Hitchcock.

Two young men strangle a third to death for kicks and place his body in a trunk, from which they callously serve refreshments to party guests, which include the murdered man's father, aunt, and girlfriend. In my first review of this film in Quirk's Reviews I wrote that “it isn't moving and it needs to be.” How ironic that watching it again recently I found it almost unbearably moving. Although it may seem that the victim gets short shrift – we never really get to know him, there are no flashbacks in which we see him, and the characters talk about him in general terms but don't really say very much about him (this in itself is chilling) – by the end of the film he is very much center stage. Although in the opening sequence John Dall seems self-conscious and all too busy “acting” the murder, in the rest of the picture he is absolutely perfect as the more dominant of the two sociopathic murderers. Farley Granger probably gives his best performance in this (although some might say it was in Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train). Cedric Hardwicke and Constance Collier are splendid as the victim's father and aunt, and Joan Chandler is sharp and savvy as the gal who was recently dumped by another party guest and is now the almost-fiancee of dead David. I had always felt that Jimmy Stewart wasn't quite powerful enough in the final sequences, but his underplaying seems quite effective this time out. All the while I was reflecting on the horrible impact this will have on the dead man's parents and girlfriend, how so many innocent lives (and two not-so-innocent) have been changed irrevocably. And that devastating final shot: Jimmy Stewart, gun in hand, sits down to face the murderers and wait for the police to arrive. His arm is draped tenderly and protectively across the trunk in which the young man's body is hidden, as if he's keeping it safe from further violation – it is a very affecting image. Despite Hitchcock's unusual approach to filming (he shot the entire picture in ten minute takes with only one actual cut), the fluid camera work keeps this interesting on the visual level, and it is not for an instant boring. The homoerotic elements are so downplayed for the most part that the film never seems especially “homophobic.”

Verdict: Rope seems to get better with the passage of time. ***1/2.