The Lady Lies

Claudette Colbert is a shop girl. She helps widower Walter Huston pick out a birthday gift for his daughter, Patricia Deering. Later, they run into each other and Huston takes her to lunch so he can read her the enthusiastic letter his daughter has written. Miss Colbert becomes Huston's kept woman and things go along very nicely until the night Huston has his children home -- Tom Brown plays his son -- and a couple of their New England relatives. They endure a Sodom-and-Gomorrah rant, and matters come to a head.

Huston certainly hit the ground running in the movies in 1929. Besides this movie and THE VIRGINIAN -- I've yet to see GENTLEMEN OF THE PRESS -- he also appeared in three shorts, one as Jean Valjean and one as Abraham Lincoln! In this movie he gives the most naturalistic performance in an early talkie I have ever seen. The opening scene has him trying to get some paperwork done while Charles Ruggles natters on; Huston's distracted, muttered replies are pitch perfect.

The story, despite its rather standard plot, has some fine situations, and director Hobart Henley takes advantage of the superior sound technicians in Paramount's Astoria studio to produce a lovely scene in a restaurant. It's shot wild, letting the camera move freely, while the soundtrack is filled with the babble of a large room's conversations. Henley had entered the movies in 1914 as an actor, and soon became a successful director. He retired from the screen in 1934, even though he was only 47; he lived another 30 years. Like many a now-obscure director, I have no idea why he quit so young.

Although technically and artistically the production is advanced for 1929, its theme is shockingly archaic. Even us 1930s film fans don't get too much exposure to the attitudes of the 1920s so this will come as is a real culture shock. It's a rare snapshot into what was considered important in pre-depression America.

This was made just a few months after Walter Huston's debut film, GENTLEMEN OF THE PRESS but in terms of filmmaking its light years ahead. Compared with that earlier 'talker' this feels like it's made by professionals. It's no great classic but it's pretty good. In this Walter Huston (who was pretty awful in GOTP but now knows exactly how to act in a talking picture) plays an upper class widow who takes a shopgirl as his lover. Even though she is Claudette Colbert, not exactly your typical working class girl, that such a relationship could be anything more than a sugar daddy - gold digger situation is considered outrageous not just by his friends and snooty family but by her friends as well.

Without revealing the plot, even Huston's and Colbert's characters consider it impossible that they could possibly be in love and certainly contemplating marriage would be about as likely as moving to the moon. I was surprised just how rigid the social structure was portrayed to be in America - it seemed as bad as ours here in England. A couple of years later however their social structure would change forever when The Depression would put people of all classes in the same boat. Whereas the 30s seems like a different world, the 20s were a different universe.

The story is probably a little bit too removed from our lives to be that accessible to most of us today but certainly for 1929, it's remarkably well made (it's even got a musical score) so it's very watchable and entertaining. If you're interested in life in the 1920s, think that Walter Huston should have been President of the world or you're in love with Claudette Colbert, you will enjoy this.

As to the title of this review - As all good Genesis fans will know, The Lady Lies is the best track on their 1978 album, And Then There Were Three.

... is on display in this film as a kind of moral code, and it might seem strange to many modern audiences to see such a thing - it did to me. It's one thing to read about it in history books, it's another to see it demonstrated theatrically. I'll get back to that later.

Robert Rossitor (Walter Huston) is a socially prominent guy and a well respected attorney with a lush of a pal who is always advising him against brunettes, and if it's 1929 and it's Paramount that drunken pal must be Charlie Ruggles, here playing Charlie Taylor. Rossitor is a widower and father to two children. At a local department store Rossitor is at the awkward task of buying a birthday present for his daughter. He is helped by sales clerk Joyce Roamer (Claudette Colbert) who helps give his gift the feminine touch Rossitor lacks. The two instantly click and the film fast forwards to two years later. Rossitor and Joyce have been enjoying a two year affair, but the topic of marriage is seldom brushed up against. It appears that Rossitor is paying for Joyce's apartment, because her digs are far too elegant to be paid for by a sales girl's salary. Charlie Taylor has set up part-time housekeeping next door as well, with blonde Hilda, whom he met in a bar and who basically set up the ground rules of their sugar-daddy relationship at their first meeting in a priceless precode discussion. Even though Joyce and Hilda look at their men quite differently, they have become best friends.

The trouble begins when Rossitor's children come home from boarding school and his New England relatives - the Tuttles - visit for dinner. This is where we get into this weird religion of the social register. Patriarch Henry Tuttle has the tone of a thundering preacher, but his words are along the lines of - we know about your girlfriend, our family tree is that of a giant elm, her's is a common shrub, stay in your own forest, your happiness doesn't count. Rossitor tells uncle Henry off in private, then Henry has the nerve to wait until Rossitor leaves the house and poisons the children's' minds against Joyce sight unseen with his very unsocial gospel.

When confronted with the fact that his children now know about Joyce and that they are dead set against any continuing relationship - even though they are all of twelve - Robert is now a double-minded man. He admits Joyce is a fine person, that she has shown him the only true happiness he's had since his wife died, yet he is a man beset with doubt as to whether or not he should break it off with Joyce and marry a woman he barely likes for the sake of appearances. How does this work out? Watch and find out. The performances here are quite natural for an early talkie, which is true for most Paramount talking films of that early sound era save the very first few that they made.

As for the weird attitude toward working people as though they are trash by Robert's New England relatives, this attitude is called Calvinism and the popular thought among the well-to-do of New England at this time was that if God liked you he showed His good pleasure by making you and your family rich, if He didn't you were poor. And if God didn't like you, why should the rich cut you any slack? How quickly the problems with this philosophy showed themselves after the Great Depression made so many rich people poor just a year or so after this film was made.

While buying a gift for his daughter, widower Walter Huston (as Robert Rossiter) finds French salesclerk Claudette Colbert (as Joyce Roamer) to be both pretty and helpful. Soon thereafter, a chance meeting leads to an over two year affair. Apparently succumbing to his snooty Massachusetts relatives, Mr. Huston decides not to marry below his station, and develops an "understanding" agreeable to Ms. Colbert. It couldn't be that Huston is listening to his perpetually drunk pal Charles Ruggles (as Charlie Tayler), who warns Huston to stay away from brunettes. Colbert is considered a "jezebel" among Huston's friends and relations.

Becoming aware of their father's affair, teenage children Tom Brown (as Robert "Bob" Rossiter Jr.) and Patricia Deering (as Josephine "Jo" Rossiter) decide to meet Colbert, who shares a New York apartment with Huston. Young Mr. Brown telephones Colbert with dire health news. To turn the tables on the tricky kids, Colbert tells them she and Huston's upcoming trip to Europe is also going to be a honeymoon. But, it's just a cruise. This is how "The Lady Lies" gets its title. The film is probably most interesting as a chance to see the then stage actress Claudette Colbert in an early starring appearance (showing plenty of profile).

**** The Lady Lies (9/21/29) Hobart Henley ~ Walter Huston, Claudette Colbert, Tom Brown, Charles Ruggles

I'll stick to the performances and the filming here, rather than to the storyline. First of all, I don't think I have ever seen a film from 1929 that is better and more naturally acted, with the microphone picking up every little vocal nuance in a way that we did not get used to entirely until at least, say, 1933 or 1934. The scenes are rarely visually static, but this is basically a filmed play, so there isn't much camera action necessary. Every one of the actors is better, or at least more natural-sounding and -looking, than in almost any other 1929 film I've seen, and there are never any of those pregnant pauses or moments when the cameraman doesn't seem to know what to do to extricate his camera from one scene and go on to the next. Maybe the actor playing the Puritanical relative is a bit on the old-fashioned side where speaking is concerned, but the man he is playing is something of a social-religious fanatic, so he gets away with it. But all four leads, plus the children (especially Tom Brown as the son) are superb throughout. I expected this of Colbert, Huston and Ruggles, but was really surprised at just HOW GOOD they were. Add to them, the not-much-seen Betty Garde as Ruggles' illicit paramour and Joyce's best friend, and it is just a wonderful quartet. Garde, whose major career was on stage, radio and early television (I seemed to see her every time I turned on the TV back then), wasn't really attractive enough for film and far too tall for most leading men at 5'10", and my only real recollection of her in movies is from two decades later, when she played the mother-dominated nurse who helps villain Richard Conte escape from his hospital confinement in CRY OF THE CITY, a vivid performance of a hopelessly unhappy large and older woman. But, here, she is just delightful as a floozie with both brains and heart, and one whom we are sure will end up snagging Charlie Ruggles for good after our part of the story ends. Ruggles is superb, but wasn't he always? Huston, who to me was one of America's five or six greatest STAR character actors of the first half of the last century (the others being Muni, Tracy, March, and the Barrymore brothers) is fine here, although his role is not quite as demanding as many others he essayed in the early talkies. But the standout is Colbert, who is simply born to act on the screen, so natural is her delivery and appearance at every moment. She has a near-cello voice and it is captured beautifully in 1929, while some other very fine actresses were still semi-screeching to be heard properly. If anything - and this is really quite amazing for 1929 - the film is underacted by all but perhaps Tom Brown, but hey the kid was only 16 and would be around for another 50 years. Yes, the story is old-fashioned, but it is not maudlin. I was very happy with, and admittedly surprised by, just how well this whole film came over, as it is superior to the vast majority of films from this very confined era that are better-remembered today.