Her Man

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.

This pre code film is from the early days of cinema. Yet its production values are not creaky. This spruced up version of the movie has a rather stylish credit sequence of waves washing over the sand.

The story begins with a woman who tries to disembark in America but she is sent back presumably labelled as an undesirable because of her criminal record, she is a prostitute.

The tropical island she is returned to is in the Caribbean, maybe Cuba. Set in the raucous, sleazy harbour area.

Frankie (Helen Twelvetrees) is a good time girl. She get the sailors in the bar drunk, pop in a Mickey Finn so they can lose their wallets. Maybe a little bit more is given if the price is right

Johnnie (Ricardo Cortez) controls the girls and he can turn nasty when provoked.

Dan (Phillips Holmes) is a sailor who understands Frankie and the path she has taken is not by choice. He has fallen in love with her and wants both of them to run away together.

Frankie knows that leaving Johnnie will not be easy. He will set his thugs on Dan. Maybe Dan's two drunken sailor friends will help him out.

The story is so-so and over the years become cliched being copied by other movies. Being set before the Hays Code, the sleaziness works well but a lot of it is implied such as the prostitutes in the harbour.

There is a lot of slapstick with Dan's drunken friends over the ownership of a bowler hat that has been stolen. There is a running gag as they play a slot machine where one wins money and the other does not.

Actually the slapstick becomes tiresome. There is a lot of visual flair by director Tay Garnett who has given a lot of thought to planning his shots.

I did think the look of Dan would now be regarded as camp. He looks like something dreamt up by Jean Paul Gaultier.

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.

"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.

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.