Street of Women

It's just a pathetic mushy melodrama with a script that sounds like it was written by a 12 year old girl from the eighteenth century. It's so staggeringly unspecial that you might start to think that AI generated pictures have been around a lot longer than you thought.

When I find a film made by Archie Mayo that's good - and there are a few: PETRIFIED FOREST, BLACK LEGION are fantastic, I'm really surprised because most of his output is bland, lazily directed rubbish like this.

He clearly could be a great director when he needed to be but usually he didn't need to. For most of his career, his job wasn't to be a good director because he was just part of the Warner Brothers factory. His function was to turn up, get a bunch of people to dress up and read their lines then his product would be used to fill some screen time in the Warner cinemas for a few days then it would get thrown in the bin. Throw-away films like this didn't need to stand the test of time, they weren't meant to be watched afterwards. If the story was any good it might get remade a few years later. Nobody would ever think of rooting around in the archives to dig out something like this even if it was only a year later. If Mr Mayo is looking down on us now watching this he'd be completely dumbfounded....and possibly embarrassed.

Once you realise that it's Kay Francis who gives the best performance in this you need to be worried. She just does what she always does but the rest of them seem like they've simply turned up for the paycheque.

A married architect is stuck in a loveless marriage, but then find love again when he starts an affair with a dress designer. However, melodrama ensures when his daughter falls in love with his mistress' brother. The drama isn't all that interesting, but the pre-production code elements of sex outside of marriage and martial infidelity make the tepid drama a bit more entertaining. Kay Francis was the only actor in the film I was familiar with.

... but in fact it's quite tame for the precode era. The title comes from a line that Kay's lover Larry Baldwin (Alan Dinehart) says about a helpful encouraging woman being behind every accomplishment on the street. The story revolves around the affair of wealthy married Larry Baldwin and fashion designer Natalie Upton (Kay Francis). They've been in love for several years, keeping it a secret from even their closest friends. Larry has basically been waiting for daughter Doris (Gloria Stuart) to grow up so he can ask his wife for a divorce. Larry's wife Lois has her calendar filled with the New York City social life and has no time for Larry. In fact she's somewhat put out with him because he doesn't need to work yet he continues to do so and his working is putting a kink in their joint social appearances at important parties. It seems she thinks that a man's place is in a tuxedo. Now that Doris is of age, Larry is about to ask his wife for a divorce, but there's one complicating factor of which nobody is aware. Natalie's kid brother Clarke and Larry's daughter Lois have fallen in love and plan to marry.

This movie is worth watching for several reasons. For one, you get to see Roland Young and Alan Dinehart play really nice guys. Usually these two played cads or outright villains. That's particularly true of Dinehart. Plus Kay Francis gives a very heart warming performance as a woman who is desperately trying to do what's right for everyone else and forgets to do what's right for herself as well. It's one of her more subtle roles, and she manages to breathe life into what looks like a pretty ordinary script. Finally, I really liked the relationship Larry had with his grown daughter - it struck all the right chords for portraying a dynamic that is transitioning from parent-child to adult-adult. The two had quite a friendship going.

Just don't judge all Kay Francis movies by this one. In 1932 Kay made three major motion pictures - "Trouble in Paradise", "Jewel Robbery", and "One Way Passage". This was just one of several B pictures that stars had to make back in the day in addition to their A list pictures.

Kay Francis (Natalie) would make two films with Roland Young (Link Gibson) in the 1930s, and Director Archie Mayo. They also paired her with Alan Dinehart (Larry Baldwin) twice, also for two pre-code movies. And it was produced by Hal Wallis, who did all the Elvis movies! Also look for Louise Beavers, who would have a starring role in Imitation of Life with Claudette Colbert two years later. In Street of Women, Natalie is a successful designer, whose brother Clarke (Allen Vincent) is coming to visit, but he's not as young and innocent as she thinks he is. Vincent was only in films for ten years, and appears to have stopped acting around 1939. Natalie has been seeing Larry, who is still married to someone else. This has several elements that will be used in "The Women" in 1939 - there's a showdown in a dress shop, between the wife and "the other woman". Natalie must figure out how to work things out without losing her family and friends, and she's got to do it all in 59 minutes. No wasted words in this shortie from Warner Brothers. Gloria Stuart, still alive as of October 2008, (plays Doris Baldwin) holds the record as the oldest actress to be nominated for an Oscar for the 1997 version of "Titanic", AND was a founding member of the S.A.G. acc to IMDb. The minister in this film, Edward LeSaint, had been acting and directing since 1912, and worked right up to his death in 1940. Interesting group of actors.

Whatever sordid ideas "Street of Women" might bring to mind, this film has nothing to do with any of them. This romantic triangle (or perhaps larger geometric figure) is more daring than it would have been after the Production Code cast its pall over Hollywood because its sympathies are squarely with the adulterous couple over the neglected wife.

In the depths of the Great Depression, audiences loved nothing more than seeing films about millionaires with no greater problems than their bed partners (or, after The Code, their platonic friendships).

The hero here is a financier building skyscrapers; the architect (no doubt to Ayn Rand's dismay) is an otherwise ineffectual sort who moons over a dress designer unaware she's the financier's mistress. The wife's crime is she wants to move about in high society rather than coming up with keen ideas to advance her husband's career as the mistress does. Since everyone has money to burn, nobody gets hurt.

As a soap opera about the sex lives of the very wealthy, what distinguishes this from similar epics? There are some interesting plot twists involving relationships between other family members that affect the two main characters. (I'm trying to avoid spoilers, though you've probably seen some by now.) There's intelligent and sometimes witty dialogue. Best of all, there's the fast pace common to the better pre-code films which, like this one, pack more plot and action into sixty minutes than today's two and a half hour epics.

Don't expect a real wild pre-coder, just a well-done romantic drama, and enjoy if that's your thing.