El malo

"The Bad One" is a very early talking picture...one that really isn't very good even by 1930 standards. Its plot is ridiculous and it's one of Edmund Lowe's worst films.

Jerry (Lowe) is an American sailor in Marseille. There he meets and falls in love with Lita (Delores Del Rio)...a woman of apparently easy virtue. Despite this propensity to rent out her love, however, she does love Jerry and agrees to marry him. But just before they are married, Jerry catches one of Lita's tricks pawing her and he slugs the guy...killing him. As a result, he's sent overseas to prison...and now he hates her because he didn't realize her background nor that the man was one of her clients. What's next?

This is a pretty hard to believe film in many places...and it just feels dated and silly today. It's really sad, as Edmund Lowe was a really good actor but here he's miscast and trying to do his best with a rather poor script.

Someone please decaffienate poor Delores Del Rio and open Mr. Lowe's eyes. Alas, no one uttered these directions to our leads. And so is spoiled a film of promise. How much cringing can one endure to enjoy some awesome sets from William Cameron Menzies? Edmund Lowe "sings", but I wouldn't call it music (embarrassing, perhaps). Miss Del Rio, clearly lost for how to act in a talking picture, emotes about 150 miles per hour. Scene after scene for the first 30 minutes is rasberry-worthy. This is such a shame, because work from the seconds and art direction invite scrutiny. A marvelous French village and prison are sumptuously photographed, and Mr. Lowe occasionally recovers the steely, resolved look that kept him popular through the '30's. Certainly, a textbook case of the birth of a new art form, and the difficulties the transition wrought.

Edmund Lowe jumps ship in Marseilles and gets tangled up with tavern dancer Dolores Del Rio, who's tangled up with Don Alvarado. Lowe left Brooklyn because of a dame, so he's not anxious to fall for someone like Del Rio, but he does, and she for him it looks like. But when they're about to get married, Alvarado starts a fight and winds up dead, and Lowe goes to prison. Is Del Rio going back to her old ways?

There's a lot of talent behind this Joseph Schenck production for United Artists, with George Fitzmaurice directing, John Farrow and Carey Wilson having hands in the script, William Cameron Menzies designing the impressive sets, and Karl Struss in charge of the camera. Visually it's a treat, with Miss Del Rio dancing up a storm, but they could have used a better dialogue director than Earle Brown, because everyone starts out vocally overwrought and stays that way throughout. As a result, it's hard to take any of them seriously, especially with Lowe's on-again, off-again lower-class accent. The result is one of those films that showed that Hollywood was still trying to learn how to talk, and not succeeding.