Ann Carver's Profession

This film will certainly surprise fans of Fay Wray as much as it has surprised me (thanks to TCM). For once, she is not the uncomprehending, defiled screaming victim with her clothes torn off by man or beast. She is an articulate and resourceful lawyer. Her (Canadian) diction and poise are admirable and she comes off almost as the prototypical Hitchcock icy blonde heroine. She shows that can she hold her own in any setting, be it drama or comedy. The film also benefits from the charms of the attractive Gene Raymond - saddled here with a boozing, accident-prone mistress - and the technical advances that allowed talkies to progress to an art of their own with a moving camera, well-suited music and decent sound without awkward silences. The story will be considered a bit dated, however, or "of its time" as they say, one of Ms. Wray's court victories consisting in demonstrating that a jilting lover cannot be found guilty of breach of promise for the simple fact that it is impossible for a man to state with any conviction whether his intended has any Black ancestry. It makes for convincing courtroom antics but its conclusion still is: How dare a Black woman expect that a white man should marry her? Gentlemen of the jury, draw your own conclusions. Add to this that her final plea is an impassioned indictment of her own frivolity for pursuing a lawyer's career and neglecting her wifely duties and you will see the many problems this films faces in attaining political correctness. Having said this, the main character's persona is still miles removed from "Legally Blonde".

Fay Wray made this the same year as she did King Kong. In this one, she stars as Ann Carver, a working girl who becomes a successful attorney - pretty far ahead of her time! She marries Bill (Gene Raymond) an architect who has big plans, but isn't as successful as he'd like to be. They run into legal trouble, and its up to Ann to try to get them out of it. A lot of clever lines and fun scenes, well done by the cast. Raymond and Wray make a very believable couple, and the script flows with no pot holes or plot-holes. Claire Dodd is in the cast, and one of my favorites, Jessie Ralph, as Terry, the over-dramatic housekeeper. This was made just prior to the film code enforcement, as we can tell by the courtroom scenes, and the backless dresses on F. Wray. "Ann Carver" has a lot in common with "The Bride Walks Out", kind of a remake by RKO in 1936, which also starred G Raymond, but this time with B. Stanwycke. Written by Robert Riskin, who won the Oscar for writing "It Happened One Night". Directed by Edward Buzzell, who directed a couple of the Marx Brothers films. Good, fun entertainment, even if the ending is a little weak.

... but wait, there's more! Law school graduate Ann Carver (Fay Wray) marries architecture graduate and college football hero Bill Graham (Gene Raymond). Being the Depression, Bill can only get a job as a draftsman. His wife stays home as was the custom in those days, even if the couple had no kids. At a dinner party, Ann gets involved in a discussion of how to win a case, and winds up with a job offer. She climbs in her profession and loves it, Bill languishes in his, and hates it.

The Grahams get posher digs, they have servants, all on Ann's money. When Bill can't pay the household servants when Ann is away on business, he quits his drafting job and gets a job singing at a club, using his football celebrity as collateral because it means much more money. Unfortunately the other singer who got him this job is played by Claire Dodd. It's always a bad omen to pal around with Claire Dodd in a precode. The Graham marriage breaks apart, and Bill takes to drinking heavily, sometimes with and sometimes without Dodd, whose advances he rebuffs.

Then Dodd's character dies and Bill gets accused of her murder. And in a preposterous development Ann defends him at trial by claiming - truly - that nobody can find a motive for Bill murdering the woman, and -ridiculously - besides it was all her (Ann's) fault because she wanted a career. How dare her! How will this turn out, watch and find out.

What makes this very paint by numbers plot rise a star above mediocre is the twist of how Claire Dodd's character actually dies. Nobody ever figures it out, except the audience, who witnesses the entire thing. The 1930's equivalent of Quincy does not come along and solve the riddle. And I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like it.

Also, there is a very precode courtroom scene, where Ann makes her name. She is defending a breech of promise suit - that is where a man promises to marry a woman and then backs out. In the 30s this could mean big bucks for the woman if the man was rich, and in this case he is. The reason he backed out was that he found out the woman was black. She claimed that he always knew she was black, and that it should have been obvious when they went swimming that she was. That she never hid her race or lied to him. The opposing counsel says that anybody should be able to tell a black woman from a white one. So Ann brings in six women - three white, three black, but all of the same skin color - and demands that the opposing counsel say who is who. The judge breaks up this circus but the point is made and the woman suing the rich man loses. Now this all sounds very racist because it is, but it was cut out of versions of this film shown in the production code era that started the following year because - wait for it - the film is making it look like race is only skin deep AND that a white man could be married to a black woman and never even know it. Oh the horror!

Sometimes even very formulaic old films are worth seeking out for the twenty minutes or so that they are NOT formulaic.

There are some films that stand the test of time. "Ann Carver's Profession" DEFINITELY isn't one of them.

This 1933 film stars Fay Wray, Gene Raymond, and Claire Dodd. The story will leave you in shock.

Raymond plays a college football star, Bill Graham, who now is working his way up in business, except that he feels stagnant. His wife Ann (Wray) was an attorney, and now she's his wife, and they're very much in love. One night at a party, she criticizes a big attorney for the way he's trying a case, and he wants to hire her. Her husband is thrilled for her and very proud.

Ann becomes a star overnight when she replaces the lead attorney on a case that will have your jaw drop to the floor. A man is on trial for consorting with a black woman he claims he did not know was black. She is on the stand and has to show her shoulder so that everyone can see her skin is darker than it is on her face. Ann wins the case by bringing women in wearing bathing suits and asking the prosecution to pick out the black women.

Okay, we made it through. The boss is so impressed that he gives her $5,000, equal to $84,000 today - this is when people made something like $100 a month, and that was a good salary. Her husband has just gotten a raise, but when she shows him her check, he doesn't say anything about it.

As Ann becomes more famous, Bill feels like he's going nowhere. He takes a job singing in a nightclub, which in the beginning Ann wanted him to take. Now, she's embarrassed and furious. He meets a woman there who is crazy about him; he starts drinking and the two have an affair. One night, she dies by accident. Bill is arrested for her murder. Ann defends him.

Ann is clearly portrayed as the villain here, putting her career before her husband and becoming haughty. Today when she got married, she would have kept working. In those days, the husband was considered a failure if his wife worked. Two-career households are very difficult, no one is denying that, and finding time together takes work and commitment. But that isn't what Ann Carver's Profession is about. It's about the importance of a woman putting her husband and her husband's ego first and taking a back seat.

Someone mentioned Fay Wray's acting in the courtroom scene as being over the top. Watch John Beal's courtroom speech in Madame X. Today it seems over the top. Back then, that was considered good acting. A lot of actors came from the stage and brought that training to film, and I think the acting on stage back then was a little bigger than we see today. As Bette Davis said, "Actors today want to be real. But real acting is larger than life." If you see this listed on TCM, take a look at it. It's a wonderful look at the mores and attitudes back then, so different from what they are today. The cast is good, and the film moves quickly. It's an artifact -- in fact, it's an antique.

Ann Carver's Profession (1933)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Entertaining curio from Columbia has Fay Wray playing a wife turned brilliant lawyer who must defend her estranged husband (Gene Raymond) when he is accused of killing a nightclub singer (Claire Dodd). This is an extremely interesting little gem that manages to be entertaining as a film but also because of the way it showed women and race of the time. The husband ends up leaving the wife because she's making more money than him, which is something he's embarrassed about. Seeing a woman work here way up without using sexuality is something else not all that common from films of this era. The way the film views race is another interesting thing because Wray's first big trial is a black woman charged with dating a white man but not telling him she was black. This entire courtroom scene is rather jaw dropping as even blackface doesn't seen as out of date as this sequence. We see the attorney bring in "questionable" black women who might be white. The entire sequence is surreal, strange and certainly something you probably won't see in too many movies. The biggest problem with the film comes in the final ten minutes when the trial of the husband actually starts. The actual ending is a downright disaster but even worse is how we get to that ending with a certain speech inside the court. It was so bad I actually wanted to hit the mute button. Wray turns in a decent performance, although I think she goes a tad bit over the top during some of the court scenes. Raymond, Dodd and the rest of the supporting cast do fine work and the director keeps everything moving at a nice pace. This is yet another forgotten film that popped up on Turner Classic Movies and it's one more should check out as it gives us a rather interesting insight to some rather strange topics.