The Strange Love of Molly Louvain

What a brilliant film! If you like pre-code films that draw you in completely, if you like fast-moving melodramas that aren't overly sentimental you will love this great gritty classic from Warner Brothers.

Unlike a lot of films from this era, this is superbly directed and filmed. Michael Curtiz builds up such an amazing level of tension that you'll be sitting on the edge of your seat within ten minutes - it really is perfectly made. The acting is realistic with believable characters and even Lee Tracy, who's usually just annoying is surprisingly fabulous in this.

Our hearts sink as we continually watch the titular Molly make wrong decision after wrong decision - we can see where this is going and we're desperate to shout at the screen, out to her across time: No, don't! Ann Dvorak in a rare staring role is outstanding. Her character is not a million miles away from Miriam Hopkins' in THE STORY OF TEMPLE DRAKE but with even more credibility. In this she's as good as Barbara Stanwyck ever was in her pre-code days and it makes you wonder why she didn't become a big star. Following this picture, she eloped with Leslie Fenton who played her gangster boyfriend which wasn't in Warner's script for her, that certainly didn't help her career.

Fast little Warners item, from a play by Maurine Watkins--who wrote the source material for "Chicago," and this hard-boiled B is very much cut from the same cloth, with big-city corruption, tough-talking dames, and vice not always unrewarded. Ann Dvorak, always good in this sort of part, is the girl from the wrong side of the tracks whose attempts to crash high society are thwarted, and ends up a fugitive, for reasons she's not quite guilty and not quite innocent of. She's also an unwed mom, and not entirely an unsympathetic one, this being a year before they started fully enforcing the Production Code. Lee Tracy plays, as he was born to play, a fast-talking, fast-thinking newspaperman, and watching him at his peak is sort of like watching Cagney--he's so lively he's impossible not to like, even playing a reprobate like this. The story doesn't quite hang together: If Molly was really abandoned by her mom at seven, as she states early on, she's only 16 at the start of the film, which makes no sense at all. And while nobody, not even Tracy, is able to recognize the peroxide version of Molly as the same on-the-lam gal in the picture they have of her, her infant daughter does, at once. The tone's uneven, too, veering between melodrama and uneasy comedy. But Dvorak and Tracy are so watchable, and the supporting cast (Richard Cromwell, Guy Kibbee, Frank McHugh) so quintessential early-'30s Warners, it's a fine time-waster.

The great Ann Dvorak wraps this up with her special brand of magic. It's really a shame she isn't more well known today. A lot of that seems to be because she didn't really have the ambition to stay on top after her initial burst of stardom which is a shame, she was always an arresting screen presence. Here as a woman more sinned against than sinner she is compelling and once she switches to platinum hair very striking. Her troubles are common ones faced in many pre-code dramas but she handles them with grit and skill. Her large expressive eyes tell volumes. Lee Tracy is abrasive but that was his usual persona so if your a fan he isn't bad, I've always found him an acquired taste. Efficiently directed by Curtiz this zips right along even if the ending is a bit of a letdown.

Curtiz' slick, odd, interesting little flick. Ann Dvorak is a small-town go-getter. Her boyfriend deserts her. She hooks up with a worthless, hustling traveling salesman and has a daughter by the boyfriend who dropped her. She tries to drop the salesman and gets involved in a murder imbroglio, but gets off with the help of fast-talking newspaper reporter Lee Tracy. Fast paced and acted in Warner's best style

Molly Louvain is a girl who has become pregnant by a rich young fellow that loves her and wants to marry her. He has told her that he intends to tell his mother that night before Molly gets to his house to attend his birthday party. However, when Molly shows up at the family estate she is told by the butler that mother and son left suddenly for Europe. Apparently Molly's fiancé loved mother's millions more than he loved Molly and no doubt Molly's would-have-been mother-in-law could not tolerate the idea of a member of the huddled masses being her future daughter-in-law. All alone in the world, Molly turns to shady character Nicky Gant, who takes her away from her home town and out on the road. Molly figures he's possibly financing their way with stick-ups, but Molly asks no questions as she has a baby to think of. One day Nick gets in a shoot-out with the cops with Molly at the wheel of the car, and suddenly Molly is up to her neck in Nick's past and present illegal activities. She dyes her hair blonde and decides to hide out under a false name in a small apartment until the heat is off. Molly has two problems that complicate matters even further - she is unable to go check on her baby, who she has left with kindly acquaintances, and ambitious reporter Scotty Cornell lives across the hall and is determined to find Molly Louvain and crack the story of a lifetime.

This film is watchable largely because nobody plays a woman suffering from the internal moral struggle of good versus evil like Ann Dvorak (as Molly Louvain) and nobody plays the smart aleck reporter that will do anything for a story like Lee Tracy (as Scotty Cornell). However, the film seems incomplete in so many ways. There is no chemistry between Tracy and Dvorak at all, and a story like this needs their chemistry in order to have their relationship in the film seem something other than tacked on. The ending is also woefully incomplete. It seems like Warners ran out of budget and the powers that be just said "stop here and write some dialogue to round this thing out".

I'd recommend this just to see Lee Tracy and Ann Dvorak do the kind of acting they do best, just don't expect the kind of precode sizzle you saw in any of James Cagney's and Joan Blondell's films.