The Runaway Bride

Mary Astor is "The Runaway Bride" in this early talkie directed by Donald Crisp - and not very well, I might add. The young and beautiful Astor is Mary Gray, who is eloping with her fiancée (David Newell). He drives too fast, is wealthy, and doesn't want to work. Mary wants a husband who will make something of himself. For unexplained reasons, Mary doesn't seem to realize what this man is like until they elope.

Mary breaks off the engagement, and he leaves the suite they've rented to make arrangements for the wedding because he's determined to marry her. While he's gone, a robber enters her room and, unbeknownst to her, hides $80,000 worth of stolen pearls in her purse. He's killed by someone else, and then the police show up. With the help of a maid, Mary makes a run for it and winds up as a cook in the home of a wealthy bachelor (Lloyd Hughes). But the gang still wants their pearls.

Convoluted and directed in a meandering fashion, this film suffers from ETS (early talkie syndrome). The dialogue is said slowly, with pauses in between, throwing the rhythm of the film off. I just saw "Paid" from around the same time, and for some reason, that film doesn't suffer from this. But so many early talkies do, with the actors not used to speaking.

Dated, draggy, and predictable, this film is only worth seeing for Astor, who in spite of the problems, manages to do quite well. Actually the performances aren't bad. But the story! Ouch.

Wow...this is one of the strangest first half hours of any film I have ever seen. Believe it or not, the first 15 minutes of the film have just about NOTHING to do with where the film goes next--and in the process, it strains credibility WAAAY past the breaking point! The film begins with Mary Astor being driven by a fiancé who is an irresponsible thrill-seeker. Again and again, he nearly gets them killed by his reckless and super-high speed driving. Yet, despite this, she STILL plans on marrying the jerk--which irritated me quite a bit.

Eventually, Mary starts to have doubts about following through with the marriage--but his driving (oddly) didn't seem to be the final straw. Here is where things get really, really contrived--and rather crazy!! The fiancé steps out of the room they rented and Mary somehow gets locked in the place. In the meantime, a detective stops by and demands to be let in--and she lies that she's not dressed when all she really needed to say was she couldn't get out of the room! And, by the way, did he stop by and why did she lie?! This made no sense--nor did it make sense when, out of the blue, a criminal climbs into the room between the time the detective knocks on the door and before he returns with a pass key!! What are the odds?!? And, in the process, the criminal shoots a cop who is chasing him!!! So, Mary is locked in a room, a detective stops by BEFORE there is a crime committed, a real crime is then committed and the criminal chooses this particular room for a hideout, the crook shoots and kills another cop before he is also shot dead, but before dying he hides the loot in Mary's bag!!!! If all this doesn't sound utterly ridiculous, it gets worse! After the detective leaves but before he returns with the pass key, the maid arrives and lets Mary out of the room. Now what would any SANE person do? Well, according to this film, you pay the maid a fortune (for 1930) and take a job the maid was going to take in another part of town--going undercover to avoid the cops even though you'd done NOTHING (other than appear in a bad film). All this mess involving the police occurred in only about eight minutes in the film!! The next portion of the film is like yet another film crammed into one very, very busy movie.

Mary is now a cook and the bachelor for whom she is working is very taken by her--and it's PAINFULLY obvious that they will fall in love by the end of the film. Why couldn't they have just kept the first portion of the film with the irresponsible fiancé and this section where she becomes the cook for this swell guy? After all, the intervening portion is just too goofy and stupid...and really undoes the entire film. Overall, the impact is very poor--and a movie that isn't really worth your time unless you LIKE 3rd rate films with occasionally bad sound (which was not terribly uncommon for an early talking picture). It's a bad film for so many reasons...but rarely is it boring!!

The Runaway Bride (1930)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Early talkie has Mary Gray (Mary Astor) eloping with Richard Mercer (David Newell) but as the two are looking over their new apartment she realizes that she's made a horrible mistake. Richard locks her up in the apartment and leaves her when later a detective comes pounding on the door. He finally gets in and for some reason at the same time a criminal climbs into the window and kills him. Fearing what to do, Mary gives the maid some cash in exchange for an employment card where Mary goes to hide as a cook for a rich man (Lloyd Hughes) but soon gangsters come after her.

THE RUNAWAY BRIDE is a really, really awful movie that is so incredibly bad that you can't help but be caught up in how bad it is. If you're a fan of these early talkies then you already know that more times than not the director and cast members were more concerned about the voices getting recorded than anything else. That's certainly the case here because there's absolutely no style to mention and it's clear that director Donald Crisp was just filming scenes without putting too much logical sense into them.

As you can tell from my plot description, the story is about as stupid as you can get and I only revealed half of it! The first ten minutes of this movie are downright insane as one illogical thing after another happens. For starters, why does Mary lie to the detective when he comes to the door? Why does she really need to run? What did she see in this guy to begin with? Why are the gangsters so stupid? There are so many logical issues with this movie that you can't help but think they weren't working off of a screenplay and if this was from an actual screenplay, you've gotta wonder what powder was going around RKO at the time. The story is so insane that it actually keeps you glued to the screen just so you can see how much worse it gets.

Astor, as you'd expect, is good in her role but you somewhat see her struggling to make anything out of the character because she has nothing to work with. Hughes is good in his role as is Paul Hurst as the cop trying to figure everything out. Sadly, the actors just can't overcome this horrid screenplay and in the end THE RUNAWAY BRIDE really is one of the worst films from this period.

Old films are always worth watching, if you want to be a student of films. It has a young Mary Astor, very beautiful indeed. Donald Crisp is the director. He was a much better actor. The performances are very wooden and stiff which is typical for early talkies. They were still learning how to say dialog. The emotions are overdone physically, because most of the actors came from the silent era where facial expressions and gestures had to replace dialog. Watch Mary Astor in one of her later silents and watch her early talkies. But watching these old films gives us a window into the past that we cannot get any other way.

Yes, the movie is awful, but there are some redeeming features, and it almost makes it into the "so bad, its good" category. I suspect that this was supposed to be a breezy screwball-comedy, crime-mystery picture. The comedy falls flat and there are too many jumps in the script and jumps in character logic to make the crime-mystery satisfying.

For example, why doesn't Mary Astor's character, Sally Fairchild,just use the fire escape to escape from the room that her runaway bridegroom has locked her in? Obviously the fire escape led down to the street as a criminal uses it to enter her room a few minutes later. The only reason seems to be that Sally couldn't escape from the room because then the criminal could not plant the diamonds on her to start the merry chase that the moves the rest of the plot forward. Then one wonders why Sally doesn't call the police when the criminal and another detective are shot in the room. Again, the answer seems to be, the movie would end right there after fifteen minutes, so she has to do the stupid thing and runaway. The screenwriter might reply that she's a runaway bride and that would be scandalous and disgraceful if the police found out. True, but she should be intelligent enough to figure out that being accused of murder trumps being accused of being a runaway bride. When she confesses to handsome Lloyd Hughes (the Lost World, 1925), "Mr Blaine, I've gotten myself into a mess," it is almost as if she's confessing to the audience how she feels about the movie she's appearing in.

The most redeeming feature and the reason to watch the movie is Mary Astor's wonderful performance. It is so sincere and she looks so beautiful and distressed throughout that you want to rush in and comfort her. It is an "A" performance in a throwaway "B" picture. We feel angry that the script and other characters are not being as sincere as Miss Astor. You feel as if her talents are being ignored and wasted. Thank goodness for John Huston and "the Maltese Falcon," otherwise modern audiences would not have appreciated Mary.

As mentioned by another reviewer, the cinematography is also quite good. It is another element that makes us sad that the script is so lightweight. Leo Tover was only 28 at the time. He would become one of the great cinematographers in Hollywood. He was nominated twice for an Oscar, but sadly, never won. "the Heiress," "the Day the Earth Stood Still," and "Love Me Tender" are some of his most well known works.

I would also note that Paul Hurst seems very comfortable playing a police sergeant. He played a detective or cop in about 20 other movies, although he was most famous for playing in Westerns.

In summary, this is a cheap, frustrating, throwaway movie, but not an uninteresting one.