Charming Sinners

Watch it for the clothes and the manners. It is a comedy of manners, and the sets are delicious. Before the Crash... Hollywood recycles 1926 hit play by Somerset Maugham, THE CONSTANT WIFE. Watch out, these people are still basically Edwardians. Americans "set in London" except Clive Brook, veddy English. An incredibly stiff young William Powell, a serviceable dandy. And Ruth Chatterton in the role of the wronged wife who's wise enough to use guerilla tactics. Laura Hope Crews as her Mother is a fascinating relic of a distant age.

Not for the faint of heart who must see a car explode every 5 minues. The tensions here are emotional and erotic, something Americans have mostly had beaten out of them.

... and for good reason! In 1929, the movie camera post dawn of sound was unable to move at all. So Somerset Maugham's play about a philandering husband who wants to have his cake and eat it too was just perfect film material given the limitations of early sound technology. So don't judge this film too harshly.

The philandering husband, Robert Miles (Clive Brook), is having an affair with Anne-Marie Whitley (Mary Nolan), also married. Robert's wife of ten years, Kathryn (Ruth Chatterton), finds out and plans her clever revenge, which, with surgical precision, manages to teach her husband a lesson, give herself a European vacation, and not ruin either her marriage or that of the Whitleys. William Powell plays the suitor that lost out to Robert ten years before and wants another chance, but it's a small part as Powell is not the big star he will be in just a few more years.

I think tragic Mary Nolan as Anne Marie has the most interesting part and she handles it quite skillfully. Anne Marie wants to preserve her marriage, yet she is careless about being seen in public with Robert by people who would have every reason to rat her out. She throws Robert's cigarette case onto her bed and it lands under her husband's pillow. Why??? You could say finances are why she wants to hang on to her marriage, but you can't say the same for her so-called "friendship" with Robert's wife, Kathryn, whom she continually and sincerely calls her best friend even though she is sleeping with her husband. What a puzzling creature she is!

Give it a chance if you ever get the opportunity. The dialogue is very witty since it is the work of a clever playwright, and the acting is quite natural. It is not the stilted stuff of other early talkies where the actors don't seem to know what to do with themselves and the writers are used to writing title cards. Only the lack of motion subtracts from its charm.

Despite their occasional creakiness, I'm a great fan of the early talkies. This one, however, is not only creaky but downright inept in every department, save one -- acting. In the acting division, thanks to the sterling efforts of Mary Nolan, Montagu Love and William Powell (in a very small, if important role), it's only 90% rotten. Clive Brook gives such a bad performance, one contemporary reviewer assumed he was playing the butler and wrote a tongue-in-cheek critique accordingly. Sad to say that while Brook plumbs the depths of ineptitude, Miss Chatterton and Miss Crews do not exactly shine either, although it's tempting to blame their staginess on the extremely static yet over-emphatic direction they obviously received from Robert Milton. As a result, the Somerset Maugham comedy-of-manners comes across with all the wit of a turkey's egg. Sparse production values and hole-in-the-wall photography don't help either.

"Charming Sinners" may be ancient in age (and the sound is often problematic, making some of the dialogue hard to hear) but it's quite modern and sophisticated in its attitudes towards marital infidelity and gender equality. Thematically, it's rather similar to Norma Shearer's "The Divorcee", which it precedes by a year. Not funny enough to be a comedy, and not dramatic enough to be a drama, but it does feature some very good acting - Ruth Chatterton is simply splendid (especially when she smiles), the little-known Mary Nolan is cute, and William Powell has a small, typically suave role. **1/2 out of 4.

"Charming Sinners" is another high society philandering movie which I can't relate to. The perpetrators and the victims are too socialized and sophisticated to say or do anything mean so they continue to put on airs as though nothing is wrong. I guess I'm working class through and through because I can't politely address cheating.

The cheaters were Robert Miles (Clive Brook) and Anne-Marie Whitley (Mary Nolan). The victims were Kathryn Miles (Ruth Chatterton) and George Whitley (Montagu Love). The movie was set in London, but they all spoke like posh New-Englanders to me. Maybe stuffy sounding accents are universal from England to America.

Kathryn knew her husband was cheating on her with her friend Anne-Marie, yet she feigned ignorance and prevented her other friends from informing her about their affair. Why? I have no idea. I can only surmise that it would've been too common to have such business openly stated. As for George, Anne-Marie's husband, he was totally ignorant and Kathryn--yes Kathryn--made sure he remained ignorant.

Yes, you read that correctly. Kathryn's husband was cheating with George's wife and Kathryn kept that fact hidden from George, and I have no idea what it all meant except high society unwritten rules or high society's understanding of how to deal with infidelity.

Karl (William Powell) was an old friend of Kathryn's who was still madly in love with her after ten years. Kathryn wanted to use Karl to make Robert jealous, but that ploy didn't work.

This movie was too polite, too pretentious, too fake, and too terrible.

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