The Gay Deception

With 20th Century Fox swallowed up by that corporate piranha, Disney, I have a feeling many of these Fox films will be lost to viewing, since I assume Disney wants to hide these in a vault and promote their own stuff. So I've decided to use a list to see some films I haven't gotten to yet.

Frances Dee and Francis Lederer star in "The Gay Deception" from 1935. People would get another idea of this title were it made today. The beautiful, wide-eyed Mirabel (Dee) comes from a town where casaba melons are grown. She wants to let loose and live, but she has to make a living. Then she wins $5000 in a lottery.

The bank tells her that at 4% interest, she can make $3.85 a week. Mirabel is not interested. She wants the money in cash and is determined to have a blast for as long as the money lasts.

According to my research, despite admonitions by the bank manager, that would be quite a while. $5000 in 1935 buys $100,000 of goods and services today. With French hats costing $19.95 and hotel suites back them costing something like $32/day, Mirabel's money will go far even in NYC.

Mirabel takes the Peach Blossom suite at the Walsdorf Astoria Hotel. She arrives with tons of luggage filled with gowns, hats, and furs. However, she is constantly hounded by a bellboy named Sandro (Lederer) who advises her on what to drink, what to order, and where to go, and she hates it and him.

He drives her crazy, but she eventually has to admit to herself she's having a rotten time. She's alone, ignored by the famous society deb in the next suite, and there's a huge ball coming up, and she's not invited.

Sandro promises that she will attend the ball, and with a prince.

One of those light, sophisticated comedies that we won't see again, reminiscent of another favorite of mine, Cafe Metropole. Surprisingly, William Wyler directed, and it's a shame he didn't do more of this type of film.

Both of the stars had interesting -- and long lives.

In 1929, Francis Lederer made "Pandora's Box" in Germany starring Louise Brooks. He couldn't speak English, and she couldn't speak German. Fortunately it was silent. Here he is in 1935 speaking English impeccably and giving a marvelous performance.

Irving Thalberg intended to make him a huge star, but with Thalberg's death, Lederer failed to make Clark Gable status. He worked until 1971 and then opened an acting school; the week of his death, at 100, he was still teaching.

Frances Dee was pregnant with Jody McCrea with her husband Joel when this film was made; two more children followed, the last one in 1955. She stopped working in the '50s with no regrets. She was married to McCrea until his death in 1990.

Some trivia: Selznick considered casting Dee as Melanie Wilkes, but backed off when he thought that her beauty might overshadow newcomer Vivien Leigh. DeHavilland's beauty was more placid; described by James Agee as "one of the very few women in movies who really had a face...and always used this translucent face with delicate and exciting talent," Dee lived until age 94.

Frances Dee plays a poor stenographer who enters a sweepstakes, wins$ 5.000 (the first prize), after which she's determined to live in a big way as long as her money lasts. She arrives at a fancy NY Hotel and meets a devil-may-care prince masquerading as a bellboy, charmingly played by Francis Lederer.

The chemistry between the two leads is excellent and although the plot is a mild frou-frou, Cinderella-type of story, it's played with uttermost sincerity and naturalness by the two leads, thanks to a deft direction by master Wyler. Frances Dee's talent and charm deserves to be widely rediscovered and properly recognized.

I love Wyler. People never talk about him regardless of the fact that he directed the best epic movie ever, Ben Hur, one of the best rom-coms ever Roman Holiday, and classics like The Best Years of Our Lives and Funny Girl.

he Gay Deception, like Roman Holiday, is a tale about a royalty wanting to be a normal, everyday person like everyone else. He ends up falling in love with a girl who on the other hand wants to be royalty, if only for one month, after she wins the lottery.

No prize for guessing the ending. But Wyler too knows the audience knows how the story will be resolved - so he makes every joke count. Every meeting is a delightful clash of the opposites, with fast witted dialogue and hilarious performances, especially by Lederer, whom I have never seen this funny.

If you look closely, you will notice small jokes with open references to sex and things impure that the Production Code was against and did not allow. This isn't It Happened One Night, but it's a nice film that will make you smile.

This is the first of a 3-movie tribute (though I own a number of his other efforts that remain unwatched) which I will be undertaking on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of distinguished (if not a personal favorite) director Wyler's passing. Despite an unfortunate title – which, at this juncture, makes it sound like a biopic of Rock Hudson (or even John Travolta)! – this is an unassuming but nice addition to the spate of sophisticated/crazy romantic comedies to emerge during Hollywood's Golden Age (thematically, it recalls James Whale's equally delightful BY CANDLELIGHT {1934}). Wyler would display this kind of light touch only sporadically throughout his career (for the record, my viewing of its not-too-dissimilar predecessor THE GOOD FAIRY from the same year is upcoming), mainly losing himself in significant solemnity thereafter: while this may have won him numerous accolades over the years, it certainly did not endear him to critics who abided by the auteur theory!

Anyway, the central casting here seems second-rate upon a preliminary glance but Frances Dee proves appealingly gauche along the way (as a small-town girl who, having won $5000 in a melon contest{!}, tries to pass herself off as a society woman while on a New York spending spree), whereas Francis Lederer is a revelation: best-known for playing sinister types (as in Jean Renoir's masterful THE DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID {1946} and the low-budget but inventive THE RETURN OF Dracula {1958}) or suave aristocratic seducers (notably Mitchell Leisen's sparkling MIDNIGHT {1939}), he retains the latter qualities here – in the role of the prince of a fictional Middle-European country posing as a hotel bell-boy! – but invests the character with quick-witted cunning and infectious charm.

The scene is thus set for a multitude of complications: Dee is misguidedly feted by the hotel staff, though still shunned by the true elite (exemplified by Benita Hume – Ronald Colman's wife – and Alan Mowbray) who can spot her modest origins a mile off; Lederer's savoir faire attitude belies his assumed rank (and even lands him in trouble with his 'superiors': forever losing his job, he then has his country's N.Y. embassy pull the necessary strings in order to get him reinstated!), while also initially putting the ingenuous heroine ill-at-ease. The eccentric, child-like ambassador himself (DAVID COPPERFIELD {1935}'s Lennox Pawle) has his hands full trying to keep Lederer's ruse a secret from a couple of investors of dubious morals (Lionel Stander and Akim Tamiroff) – so that, when taking Dee to a ball under his real guise and ostensibly exposed as a fraud, having had to assemble his officious wardrobe from bits and pieces belonging to various people at the hotel (including ubiquitous character actors Luis Alberni and Robert Greig), Pawle cannot vouch for the prince, and the latter is thus thrown in jail! An earnest Dee tries to intervene, believing Lederer had done this grand gesture for her sake…but, upon being revealed for what he really is, she feels used by him and flees in humiliation, intent on going back home. The inevitable last-scene reconciliation, then, is brought on by the simple (i.e. idealized) act of having the hero sneak into the leading lady's room dressed-up once again in a bell-boy's uniform!

Fun romp with dashing Francis Lederer and lovely Frances Dee.

This is the kind of screwball movie that Hollywood can never make again. We have become too jaded, too complicated, too sophisticated.

You know the ending way before it comes, but the ride is full of smiles and giggles and silly surprises that will make your insides gurgle with joy and harken you gently into a more innocent time.

William Wyler's direction is nearly flawless. He wasn't Bette Davis' favorite director for nothing. It seems that he could do most anything.

Also, watch for the wonderfully goofy Lennox Pawle, stately Alan Mowbray and instantly recognizable Akim Tamiroff in one of the many roles that made their faces well-known but not necessarily their identities household names.

Sit back and take it in. Smile. You deserve it.