Her Man

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.

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.

This is a superb rarity, a period piece with a terrific lead performance by Helen Twelvetrees, who plays Frankie Keefe, the Frankie of the 'Frankie and Johnnie were lovers' story. (Her lover plays this song on the piano throughout the film in true honky tonk fashion.) The film is mostly set is a large seedy waterfront bar named Thalia, in Havana. Frankie works as a hostess in the bar, trying to lure seamen in to having another gin. One of her recurring lines is: 'Two gins', one of which is water for her and the other is real for the sailor. Her boyfriend Johnnie, pianist at the Thalia, is a ruthless amoral pimp, who takes all her tips from her clients every night and generally abuses her and beats her up sometimes. Frankie has about as much sense of self-worth as a flea, but is a charming fairylike creature underneath. She dreams of getting away from 'the joint', having been born in one just like it and never known any other existence. Tay Garnett wrote the original story and did an excellent job of directing this atmospheric film. He does some excellent and daring shots sometimes. In one case he puts a camera on a high dolly and follows a tray with two gins on it, held aloft by an agile waiter, from the bar through a teeming crowd to the table on the other side of the room. Helen Twelvetrees was an actress with real depth to her. She conveys the wistfulness and dreams of Frankie in those rare moments where she dares to let down her guard for a moment, and then suddenly slips into her assumed tough-gal mode which is her usual manner. The two personalities of Frankie battle it out as she vacillates between hope and despair throughout the story. She portrays Frankie as a truly pathetic abused waif. Johnnie is played by Ricardo Cortez, with heartless cunning and psychopathic intensity. He likes to kill people with his small knife. Marjorie Rambeau plays a washed-up elderly prostitute who is a hopeless alcoholic but who loves Frankie and tries to save her. She features in a unique twist in the last shot of the film, which adds a sudden and unexpected insight at the end of the story, which I cannot reveal. The ray of sunshine which offers Frankie the promise of escape comes in the form of a young cheery sailor played by Phillips Holmes, a very handsome and delightful fellow, who gets round Frankie's tough pretences by laughing at her and knows exactly how to draw her out and eventually gain her confidence. He wants to save her and take her away to a new life and marry her, but Johnnie cottons onto this and has other ideas, and turns to his usual solution, his knife. Will she or won't she escape? Will the film end as a tragedy or will everything turn out all right? Helen Twelvetrees is so entrancing as the waif Frankie that we really care. She was only 21 when she made this film, and by the age of 30, her career was over. She took an overdose of pills and died when she was only 49. She seems to have had an all too genuine and profound melancholy deep within her, which makes her performance shine with such pathos here. This film has remarkable beginning and end credits, with everything written in the sand and then repeatedly washed over and erased by the surf, which is very original and effective. The film is well worth seeing.

"Her Man" is a very enjoyable old film. However, as I watched, I couldn't help but think that it was a bit like a Popeye cartoon--a very sleazy and adult Popeye cartoon at that!

The film is set somewhere where there is a port--perhaps on a Caribbean island. The summary on IMDb says that the leading lady, Frankie (Helen Twelvetrees) is a Parisian but the location is definitely NOT Paris (there is no large port there and very few palm trees). Plus, neither Twelvetrees nor any of the other actors have any sort of French accent or make any mention of France. Regardless, this 'lady' works at a clip joint--a bar where they cheat sailors and the women are definitely NOT ladies! The place is run by a scum-bag named Johnnie (Ricardo Cortez) and he oozes with sleazy and menacing charm. In many ways, he seems like a homicidal pimp---promising HIS women the world but forcing them into lives of quiet desperation.

One day, a nice sailor named Dan (Phillips Holmes) enters the place and Frankie is expected to do her routine--steer him to alcohol while drinking water disguised as gin. In other words, she gets him to buy her these expensive drinks and who knows how much, if anything, he'll be left with at the end of the evening. However, Frankie feels sorry for the guy since he seems pretty decent and she rescues him from the place. Despite her cold outer shell, he sees her as a decent woman--stuck in a hellish life. So, he offers to take her away from this dump. The problem is that the last guy who tried that was killed by Johnnie. What's next?

This is an amazingly gritty and sleazy sort of film. Oddly, however, they also threw in some comic relief that really distracted from the plot. Perhaps they thought the film would be too gritty and too depressing otherwise. Regardless, the film has some fine acting and is far less stilted than most early talkies. In particular, I loved the opening scene with Marjorie Rambeau walking through the streets as the camera moved with her. It was a difficult shot technically and it really impressed me as I watched this camera-work. Worth seeing and available for free at the internet archive website.

It's a variation of the Frankie and Johnny story with the same cast names and even a Nelly thrown into the mix courtesy of Thelma Todd. Bad guy Ricardo Cortez (Johnny) pimps out Helen Twelvetrees (Frankie) to steal from drunken visitors in a seedy dive on the waterfront in somewhere like Cuba. It's a rough bar that is frequented by sailors and people generally looking for a fight. Occasionally, if a customer gets too friendly with Helen, then that's the end for him - knife in the back.

As in the song - "He was her man and he was doing her wrong" - Cortez has a friendship with Todd. He doesn't seem too nice a person when he's around Twelvetrees. Into the bar strolls a new crop of sailors headed by Phillips Holmes (Dan) and it's love at first sight on his part leading him to dangerously pursue this 'taken' woman.

This film has a gritty, seedy setting which holds an interest with realistic characters. However, the film has to lose marks on 2 counts especially. The first is Phillips Holmes and his attempt to portray a tough sailor. He really doesn't need to puff out his chest when he walks. It's the blueprint for Popeye. Secondly, there was way too much attempted comedy with drunken sailors that just got tiresome. The women, in particular, in this film are good so it's a special mention for Twelvetrees, Todd and drunken lush Marjorie Rambeau (Annie).