Men of Chance

Mary Astor and Riccardo Cortez worked well together. Here, she is a bad girl. Or she is perceived to be a bad girl. She's in Parish when we meet her. Her dreams of being an artist have fizzled and she's down on her luck.

She marries American gambler Cortez. He's hard-boiled but falls for her right away. She's hard-boiled and doesn't fall for him right away but does eventually. (This is not giving away the plot.) Both are excellent. It is, however, a rather creaky plot. Though the movie was made before the Code, it is not at all racy. The racetrack scenes look authentic and are fun.

When the film begins, Marthe (Mary Astor) is broke in Paris and unable to feed herself, let alone boat fare back to the US. However, an odd man befriends her and grooms her for marriage. Now, this woman of humble birth is a countess--and soon ropes a rich gambler, Johnny Silk (Ricardo Cortez). He's daffy about her and wants to marry her...and she is afraid to tell him the truth about herself. She does love him and reluctantly agrees to marry him.

Back in the States, the couple is quite happy though Marthe still hasn't told him the truth. In the meantime, Marthe's old benefactor arrives from Paris. He says he's broke and she offers him help....and he then springs his trap. What this trap is and why is something you'll need to see for yourself as well as Marthe's reaction when she realizes she's been a pawn in a very expensive and complicated game.

This is a very interesting film and offers several nice twists and turns. Along with some nice acting, this one is a nice little film and worth your time.

Ricardo Cortez and Mary Astor star in "Men of Chance" from 1931, also starring John Halliday.

Astor plays Marthe, a literal starving artist in Paris who is picked up by Dorval (John Halliday). He makes her an offer she can't refuse in her present situation: he will dress her, put her up in the best hotel, and introduce her around as a French countess. She attracts a wealthy man, rich American gambler Johnny Silk (Cortez), who proposes to her. At first she's interested in him for his money, but later, she falls in love with him.

Dorval and his partner Farley are actually after Johnny and want to bring him down. Without realizing it, Marthe is feeding racing tips to them, and they're winning and depleting Silk's fortune.

Good, straightforward film, with a nice horse race sequence at the end. The lovely Astor gave a winning performance as poor Marthe, the regal Countess, and finally a woman in love. She was an interesting actress - an ingénue in the silent era, a leading lady with a beautiful speaking voice in the '30s, and made her big mark as the mysterious, treacherous Bridget O'Shaunessey in The Maltese Falcon in 1941. By the mid-40s, she was doing character roles, which she did until 1964, a 43-year-career.

Ricardo Cortez to me has never been anything but okay, though he was pleasant looking. He entered silents during the Valentino era and promptly changed his name from Jacob Krantz. There was just nothing special about him or the films in which he appeared. He slid to B films and then character parts and finally returned to working on Wall Street though he kept acting until 1960.

John Halliday is appropriately evil and slimy.

If you catch this on TCM, see it, you'll like it. Even though it's precode, though, the only racy thing is the horses.

In Men of Chance, Mary Astor finds herself poor and destitute in Paris. When she gets arrested for suspected prostitution, when all she was doing was allowing a fellow traveler to sit beside her at a café, she thinks the worst has happened. Then, John Halliday comes to her rescue and reinvents her image as a rich countess. Before she knows it, she's highly respected and the successful gambler Ricardo Cortez falls in love with her.

Similar to other racehorse films of the 1930s, like Saratoga and Broadway Bill, this romantic drama has been forgotten over the decades. It's not really the best movie out there, even though the beginning setup with Mary's arrest is interesting. If you like racehorses in movies, you'll find a host of movies to watch in the 1930s, when the sport was extremely popular.

She's a starving artist in a fetching studio-bound Paris, entrapped for soliciting (Implausibility #1) and bailed out by John Halliday, who sees something.unique in her and offers to set her up as a countess, a disguise nobody bothers to look into (Implausibility #2). In that guise she meets a smitten Ricardo Cortez, who falls instantly in love with her and demands that they get married (Implausibility #3), taking her best pal (a fun Kitty Kelly), who's been posing as her maid, along on the honeymoon (Implausibility #4). Cortez, who's at his most boisterous and leading-man-handsome here, is a gambler and horse aficionado, which leads to Mary innocently feeding info to Halliday that ruins Cortez, who instantly turns on her and throws her out (Implausibility #5), until she engineers a way of turning around her innocent mistake. It's not, in short, credible, but the two stars are photogenic, and Astor already owns the screen, offering a layered performance of a not very layered character. The horse racing sequences are exciting, and the horse Cortez bets it all on is a real beauty; the scene between him and the horse is truly touching. I'd expected this to be Warners, but it's RKO, and it's a good-looking, lively early talkie. With many implausibilities.