Two Kinds of Women

'Two Kinds of Women' was directed by William de Mille (lower-case 'd'), the brother of Cecil De Mille (upper-case 'D') and the differing orthography is significant: Cecil De Mille made upper-case movies in a big way, whilst William de Mille made lower-case movies in a small way. 'Two Kinds of Women' is competent but not compelling. This drama dabbles rather shallowly in the haedonism of Prohibition-era America, with Miriam Hopkins checking into a posh Manhattan hotel and then sauntering into the speakeasy that operates openly right down the street.

I've never fancied Hopkins, though in one scene here she wears a spectacular pair of black leather gauntlet gloves. She plays Emma Krull (any relation to Felix Krull?), a sheltered young woman from Sioux Falls, South Dakota (speaking her dialogue in an odd accent with broadened vowels) who accompanies her Comstocking senator father (Irving Pichel, very good) to sinful New York City. She crosses paths with Phillips Holmes as a Connecticut playboy (speaking in a peculiar mid-Atlantic accent; what is it with these accents?). Now get this. Holmes's character has been a wastrel and a womaniser all his life, but as soon as he meets Hopkins he decides he wants to marry her and get a white picket fence. I thought this was the line he was telling her to get her into bed ... but no, he really wants to marry Miss Krull and raise some little krullers.

But while Phillips drinks a screwdriver, we learn his guilty secret. He once got drunk in New Haven and woke up married to Wynne Gibson. (Serves him right for being in New Haven.) Gibson has been bleeding him dry (I'll have a dry Gibson, to go with that Phillips screwdriver) ever since. Now he wants a divorce, but he won't let her shake him down for a settlement. Holmes offers to sell his sapphire studs, so I guess he must be desperate. The neurasthenic Phillips Holmes is a performer whom I consistently dislike, but here he's lumbered with some unfortunate dialogue. He tells Gibson she has an icebox for a heart, then in the next scene he tells Hopkins that Gibson has a cash register for a heart. Which is it, buddy: an icebox or a cash register?

Along the way, we get some *really* bad rear-projection shots of Manhattan. At the climax, when one character falls out a penthouse window, it's more obvious than it needs to be that the plummeting body is a dummy. More positively, one scene between Hopkins and Holmes takes place at a gymkhana, and de Mille stages this with actual equestrians riding past, instead of stock footage.

One sequence impressed me very much. In the speakeasy, the camera pans along the hands of the customers at the bar, concealing their faces and bodies. Using only hand gestures and voice-overs, de Mille swiftly conveys several different dramas unfolding in this ginmill. Less effective is a party scene in which a mulatta songstress warbles jazz while the guests' body movements keep time with the music ... walking in tempo, drinking in tempo, but none of them actually dancing. Elsewhere, de Mille gives the actors (or allows them to use) some truly dire blocking, as if they were in a stage play rather than a movie. And why do so many doors in this movie have chequerwork panelling?

There are some excellent performances here. James Crane, previously unknown to me, is impressive as a desperate crook. Josephine Dunn is good in a comedy-relief role that turns out to be crucial to the plot. Stanley Fields (whom I usually dislike) and the very underrated Edwin Maxwell are good too. I was especially impressed with Robert Emmett O'Connor as Tim Gohagen, a mysterious party goer who seems to have contacts in high places: when the penthouse party gets raided, one of the detectives looks right at O'Connor and pretends not to see him. In all, I'll rate this movie 6 out of 10. I wish that William de Mille were better known, but there's no question that his brother Cecil was the better director.

Senator Krull of South Dakota (Irving Pichel) is planning a trip to New York City to preach against New York City. His daughter Emma (Miriam Hopkins) pleads with dad to take her with him. She is devoted to him and does want to take care of him, but those lights of the big city also beckon.

When she gets there she goes out on the town with a friend and winds up meeting the wealthy Joseph Gresham Jr. (Phillips Holmes). They end up seeing lots of each other and it looks like it is getting serious. But Joe has a secret. He married a party girl one night (Wynne Gibson as Phyllis) and she wants one hundred thousand dollars in order to give him a divorce. They only had the one night together - he hasn't lived with her since the wedding night. And he is right when he says that he could have the marriage annulled because of that. But that would also alert his dad who would kick him out for soiling the family name by getting into such a predicament in the first place. So when Phyllis falls to her death from her high rise apartment, Joe is suspect number one.

If I didn't know when this film was made I would have thought it was one of those made about the time that the production code came into being, because all of the moralizing Senator Krull does just seems over the top unless you are trying to impress a censor. It is extremely puzzling given that this is the reason the Krulls are here in the first place. Why does a South Dakota senator feel it necessary to lecture people in New York? Would a New York senator go to South Dakota to lecture the locals about agriculture subsidies?

Wynne Gibson is good as the party girl wife, and she was always good at brassy parts, but she was usually best when she was playing a person with a good heart and rough edges, and here she is a mercenary person.

I enjoyed this, but it is probably only mildly recommended unless you are a fan of the precode Paramounts as I am.

A wonderful blend of moralising and salaciousness preached at a world where everyone and everything was either good or bad, black or white. The script isn't what you'd call subtle or sophisticated but William de Mille directs with enough style and imagination to keep you glued to this one.

This one really captures that early thirties feel. It's not one of the classics but everything about this just oozes 1930s atmosphere. Like all the best pre-code dramas, the whole plot is explained in a two minute conversation at the start and everything is happily resolved in the last thirty seconds. The intervening hour is reserved for the craziest, convoluted, cliched love story you've ever seen....since the last pre-code movie you watched! If you like this pre-code pictures, you've got to see this one.

Its story - naive out-of-towners get seduced by the big city is similar to BIG CITY BLUES made the same year but even though that one starred Joan (surely a goddess) Blondell, it isn't anything like as good as this. (That did however have Eric Linden who's an even limper, more characterless 'actor' than Phillips Holmes.) This is really enjoyable and despite some utterly absurd plot devices and ridiculous twists, the naturalistic acting, mainly from Hopkins (not Holmes) makes this feel like you're witnessing an authentic slice of life.

In this version of the archetypal 'don't go to the big bad city' story, Miriam Hopkins is the wide-eyed country girl awed by the skyscrapers and speakeasies. She's actually brilliant in this. We've all seen MR SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON and cringed a little as James Stewart wanders unconvincingly around Washington marvelling at the monuments like he's love struck. You don't cringe when Miriam Hopkins does this - she's one hundred percent believable, totally natural and shows that talent that not all actors had in the thirties: to not seem like she's acting when she's acting. This is not her best picture but her performance is truly outstanding.