Sua Mulher Perante Deus

Shortly after the story begins, someone abandons a baby aboard a freighter with a note attached to him. It says that the baby belongs to someone aboard the ship and she was leaving it forever. The Captain (Gary Cooper) at first wants to drop the baby off ashore but soon decides to keep the cute little guy. But he cannot run the ship AND care for a baby at the same time, so he looks for a woman to help with raising the kid. Soon he finds Sally (Claudette Colbert) and she feeds him a line about being the daughter of a recently deceased missionary...when she actually is a bit of a tramp. Despite this, she turns out to be a good foster mother and things seem to be going just fine. However, a crew member recognizes Sally and thinks that because she's had a past that it entitles him to attack her! But the Captain hears the commotion and comes to Sally's defense. In the ensuing scuffle, the evil crew member is knocked off the ship and presumed lost. But this isn't the end to all this....and what happens next, well, you'll just have to see it for yourself.

I really enjoyed this film, though I am sure some might object to it being a bit schmaltzy. What I liked most is that the story attacked the old so-called 'double-standard'...where men are supposed to be 'experienced' and that women, if they have similar experiences, are tramps! I appreciated the message and enjoyed seeing where the film went. Very unusual and worth seeing.

Veteran Sloman's long career was winding down in 1931, but he shows a steady hand in this cliché tale of a stern but naive young sea captain (Cooper) who falls for the "entertainer" (Colbert) who, desperate to escape from a South American port, bluffs her way on board as nurse for a foundling baby dumped in the ship's dinghy. Romance takes second place, however, to scenes stolen by the engagingly vivacious and good-natured baby (Richard Spiro), and by the ship's African-American servants, played in Amos and Andy-style cross-talk by Hamtree Harrington and Sidney Easton. (Journeyman director of photography William O. Steiner went on to light a number of films featuring African American entertainers.) HIS WOMAN is a respectable B movie, worth seeing for the almost exaggeratedly tall young Cooper and the detail of Colbert's tramp friends, who lounge around their shared apartment in pre-Production Code undress. Colbert's first appearance, arriving by boat at night in search of a nightclub job, and some byplay in the cantina between Cooper and dancer Raquel Davidovich, who tempts him by kissing a flower, both recall Marlene Dietrich and Cooper in the previous year's MOROCCO, suggesting Paramount may have hoped to trade on that film's success.

Well, this was an unexpectedly entertaining and thoughtful film. Don't look up the story first or you'll not feel the jolts of the clever and quite unpredictable twists. For 1932, this is a lot more realistic than was common then giving us a perfect reflection of that age. This has easily as much seedy grime as anything they were doing at Warners.

Gary Cooper is uncharacteristically lively in this. Not sure his management style which ranges from negotiation by fists to smashing a glass bottle into a guy's botty with a crowbar would be that acceptable now though. Not sure his sexist arrogance: the purpose of a man is to work, the purpose of a woman is to bring up a man's child, would make him particularly endearing either but under that alpha-male macho man there's a kind hearted ...gorilla below. Gary Cooper can sometimes be so lugubrious that he can send you to sleep but under the dynamic direction of Edward Sloman (no, never heard of him either) Cooper is like an erupting volcano of testosterone.

He steals every scene including those with the divine Miss Colbert - and that's coming from her biggest fan! It's not just Mr Cooper or Miss Colbert who give excellent, realistic and natural performances, all of Mr Sloman's actors seem like real people with real and authentic personalities. If this is representative of Edward Sloman's work then the guy should be more well known. He doesn't just make his characters come to life, he makes what you're looking at become reality. You can smell the stench of the filthy streets of the port, you almost have a sense of danger yourself.

Two familiar 1930s themes are tackled here. The somewhat sexist title itself: HIS WOMAN is purposely controversial. OK, we're a hundred years ago so don't expect equality but questioning Cooper's Captain Sam's misogynistic attitudes are central to this picture. The other trope is snobbery - in this case taken to the extreme. When Claudette Colbert first meets Gary Cooper she makes him believe that she's the daughter of a missionary and that's fine and dandy. When however he discovers that she's worked in a brothel then that's too much for this fine, upstanding, morally righteous Christian...and frequenter himself of brothels. It's interesting to wonder what inner conflicts are going on in his mind, to wonder how he can justify what he believes or to wonder whether he's just an idiot.

The focal point of the whole picture centres on a crewman trying to rape Colbert's Sally having discovered her occupation. The question - as utterly ludicrous as it seems to us now is: is it ok to rape a young woman if she had once worked as a prostitute? Bizarrely the consensus seems at the time to be a definite yes! There's not even any suggestion that the crewmen was out of order - she was the guilty one! The 1930s wasn't just another time, it was another world!

All this commentary makes this sound like it's a very deep and heavy film but nothing could be further from the truth. Edward Sloman's manages to set off all these little explosions in your brain whilst still maintaining an almost upbeat light-hearted mood.

No matter what film Gary Cooper is in, he always acts and looks the same. His tall, gangling figure makes him look clumsy and awkward, and his monotone voice has no variety, range or depth of emotion. But the one thing I definitely don't believe about him is that young women fall for him. This is totally down to biased scripting.

Merchant skipper Gary Cooper finds a baby parked on his ship. It's so cute he decides to keep it, but needs a woman to take care of it. Enter Claudette Colbert, a stranded demimondaine. To get the job, she claims to be the daughter of a recently deceased mercenary. Coop thinks she's a lady, so he gives orders to the crew to that effect, but Averell Harris knows better and plays rough.

It's a remake of 1928's SAL OF SINGAPORE, and by itself it looks pretty good, even if the speed of the ending makes it look like a programmer. Still, you've got those two in the leads, and further down the cast list, early roles for Barton McLane, Douglas Dumbrille, Preston Foster, and William Gargan. Certainly it's not a great movie, but it's always watchable with visual stylist Edward Sloman directing. It's a good one to check off your list.