Her Man

A good start: the credits are written in the sand and washed away by waves, with only the sound of the surf. The story starts with Rambeau being met at the bottom of the gangplank in New York by the law, and told to return directly to Havana, do not pass go. When we get back to Havana we find that the film's not about Rambeau, but about 12trees, who is under the thumb of Cortez. In an early scene, Cortez's henchmen stage a fight to draw attention while he surreptitiously kills an enemy by throwing a knife; a well managed, cold blooded murder. Holmes, in one of his best performances, is a sailor on leave who is taken with 12trees, even though she plays her best B-girl routine on him. That's the set-up, and it's really well played out all the way to the end. The plot structure is good, with Cortez getting poetic justice, and with no false moves. The atmosphere is great, particularly in a bravura street set, which a moving camera travels down twice, through crowds of drunks, whores and assorted riffraff. One of these tracking shots has 12trees bouncing along behind Cortez, the perfect image of a floozie following her pimp. The camera is fluid throughout the film, prowling around the huge bar set as well as the streets. And 12trees shows that she can deliver a performance that's a bit different from the put-upon wives of MY WOMAN and NOW I'LL TELL. Although some of the dialogue is a bit primitive, one can well see why this film "has its adherents" (per Halliwell). Unfortunately, all this great stuff is interspersed with a series of simple repeating burlesque blackouts: Gleason losing--and his pal winning--at the one-armed bandit; Summerville and drunks bashing (or not bashing) a hat; Pangborn challenging others to a fight, etc. The mechanical nature of the gags, and their constant reiteration, tends to defeat the suspension of disbelief needed for the serious drama in the foreground. Even so, this one is a pre-Code era must-see.

The Wexner Center for the Arts screened the 4K restoration of this film on May 24th as part of their Cinevent preview. For such an early talkie, the camera is surprisingly fluid and the sound is ambient. The impressive movement makes this decent story better than average.

The story is very loosely based on the song "Frankie and Johnny." Frankie (Helen Twelvetrees) is a prostitute working in a saloon called the Thalia in a seedy island town. She frisks drunken sailors and characters of ill-repute and her pimp Johnny (Ricardo Cortez) takes all her money. Frankie is described as a "good girl," which may mean she has not completely lost her innocence yet, but it is clear that that day is not too far in the future. One day a young sailor (Phillips Holmes) and his friends come to the bar and his youthful optimism makes Frankie see that he could help her escape her depressing life.

Twelvetrees is undeniably beautiful, and her acting is fine although slightly dramatic. Holmes truly shines in this role. He is boyish and charming and much less wooden than in some of his rich guy roles. With his hair down and his shirt torn he seems to truly breathe. Franklin Pangborn makes an appearance as a well-dressed drunk sans his trademark effeminate delivery, and he gets laughs anyway.

It is probably notable - although this is a side story -for showing what happened older prostitutes as they began to trade on rapidly diminishing assets. The very first scenes are Annie (Marjorie Rambeau) leaving the Havana bar where she has probably been for decades and leaving a ship with the cops recognizing her and telling her to go back onboard. That with her criminal history she cannot come into the US. Then you just see her feet and legs from the knee down, walking wearily along the street, back to the Havana bar that is her home.

The central story is about a young prostitute, Frankie (Helen Twelvetrees), her pimp, Johnnie (Ricardo Cortez), and a young sailor, Dan (Phillips Holmes) who sees the good in Frankie and wants to take her away from all of this. The film portrays Frankie as a pickpocket, but nobody dresses in such a ridiculous gaudy fashion just to empty the pockets of drunks, so her true profession is merely implied. What Frankie doesn't know is that Johnnie is a killer and will do anything to keep her in the bar and working for him.

There is some comedy thrown in that actually works. I say that because during Prohibition it seemed that filmmakers thought that just having someone publicly drunk was supposed to be funny when today it is tiresome. But the duo of Harry Sweet and James Gleason as Dan's two continuously drunk sailor companions is truly funny. So is Franklin Pangborn as a rather distinguished fellow with a bowler hat that the two drunk sailors want to steal. It's odd seeing Pangborn depart from the snooty effete fellows that he usually played. Slim Summerville is a drunk who continuously tries to knock hats off of people's heads. What is this obsession with hats?

I'm not spoiling anything, because the movie doesn't say this or even imply it, but because Frankie says she doesn't even know her birthday or her folks and has been living a life of cheating and stealing as long as she can remember, I rather wonder if Annie was her mother? Annie seems to focus on Frankie's welfare more than on the other girls in the bar, and if Annie grew up knowing nothing more than what Frankie knew -stealing and prostitution since childhood - maybe she thought that what little she did was what motherhood looked like. The sins of the fathers being visited on the third and fourth generation may not be God being vindictive as much as it is the statement of an unpleasant truth.

I'd recommend this one. It has good camera work and natural performances for it to be an early sound film.

A surprisingly fluid talkie that blows the theory that

widespread primitive filmmaking returned after the coming of

sound. The long opening tracking shot down a street populated

with colorful characters ending within the interior of a saloon

is a real jawdropper when one realizes that this gutsy melodrama

is from 1930. It also boasts superb camerawork and is a sheer

joy to watch. This film is NOT easy to see as of this writing (I

viewed a rare print in a private collection) and I fear is in

desperate need of preservation.

This isn't the safe, sanitised Cuba we see in HAVANA WIDOWS. No, this is a much darker, dirtier and dangerous place. Hugely underrated director Tay Garnett has gone for gritty, grimy realism here - this is certainly not the sort of place you'd find Joan Blondell! It's surprising therefore to find Helen Twelvetrees, the epitome of purity and sweetness here as one of the seasoned prostitutes servicing and fleecing the sailors on shore leave.

She might not have been as great an actress as some of her contemporaries but in this she is absolutely magnificent. Her dissolute character is so believably real and yet her face is so impossibly pretty and innocent that your brain explodes with the cognitive dichotomy of it all. If you've only ever seen her playing stereotypically mistreated young women constantly crying, this will be a revelation for you. Had she not got pigeonholed she might have been a great actress - who knows!

Interestingly this is one of those rare talkies made by Pathe before it was taken over by RKO. It's a superbly well made film and had the Depression not happened just as they were getting going, Pathe might have been one of the great studios - who knows!

Besides Helen Twelvetrees' remarkable acting masterclass, Ricardo Cortez is also great as her semi-psychopathic pimp. You can see why Garnett used him a year later to play the crazy, evil mob boss in his impressive gangster picture, BAD COMPANY. Overall, this is a surprisingly exciting and quite riveting drama. Some commentators have said that there's an annoying amount of irritating comedy - I disagree, I think the blend is just right making this a very entertaining film.