Her Man

A good start: the credits are written in the sand and washed away by waves, with only the sound of the surf. The story starts with Rambeau being met at the bottom of the gangplank in New York by the law, and told to return directly to Havana, do not pass go. When we get back to Havana we find that the film's not about Rambeau, but about 12trees, who is under the thumb of Cortez. In an early scene, Cortez's henchmen stage a fight to draw attention while he surreptitiously kills an enemy by throwing a knife; a well managed, cold blooded murder. Holmes, in one of his best performances, is a sailor on leave who is taken with 12trees, even though she plays her best B-girl routine on him. That's the set-up, and it's really well played out all the way to the end. The plot structure is good, with Cortez getting poetic justice, and with no false moves. The atmosphere is great, particularly in a bravura street set, which a moving camera travels down twice, through crowds of drunks, whores and assorted riffraff. One of these tracking shots has 12trees bouncing along behind Cortez, the perfect image of a floozie following her pimp. The camera is fluid throughout the film, prowling around the huge bar set as well as the streets. And 12trees shows that she can deliver a performance that's a bit different from the put-upon wives of MY WOMAN and NOW I'LL TELL. Although some of the dialogue is a bit primitive, one can well see why this film "has its adherents" (per Halliwell). Unfortunately, all this great stuff is interspersed with a series of simple repeating burlesque blackouts: Gleason losing--and his pal winning--at the one-armed bandit; Summerville and drunks bashing (or not bashing) a hat; Pangborn challenging others to a fight, etc. The mechanical nature of the gags, and their constant reiteration, tends to defeat the suspension of disbelief needed for the serious drama in the foreground. Even so, this one is a pre-Code era must-see.

A surprisingly fluid talkie that blows the theory that

widespread primitive filmmaking returned after the coming of

sound. The long opening tracking shot down a street populated

with colorful characters ending within the interior of a saloon

is a real jawdropper when one realizes that this gutsy melodrama

is from 1930. It also boasts superb camerawork and is a sheer

joy to watch. This film is NOT easy to see as of this writing (I

viewed a rare print in a private collection) and I fear is in

desperate need of preservation.

This is a superb rarity, a period piece with a terrific lead performance by Helen Twelvetrees, who plays Frankie Keefe, the Frankie of the 'Frankie and Johnnie were lovers' story. (Her lover plays this song on the piano throughout the film in true honky tonk fashion.) The film is mostly set is a large seedy waterfront bar named Thalia, in Havana. Frankie works as a hostess in the bar, trying to lure seamen in to having another gin. One of her recurring lines is: 'Two gins', one of which is water for her and the other is real for the sailor. Her boyfriend Johnnie, pianist at the Thalia, is a ruthless amoral pimp, who takes all her tips from her clients every night and generally abuses her and beats her up sometimes. Frankie has about as much sense of self-worth as a flea, but is a charming fairylike creature underneath. She dreams of getting away from 'the joint', having been born in one just like it and never known any other existence. Tay Garnett wrote the original story and did an excellent job of directing this atmospheric film. He does some excellent and daring shots sometimes. In one case he puts a camera on a high dolly and follows a tray with two gins on it, held aloft by an agile waiter, from the bar through a teeming crowd to the table on the other side of the room. Helen Twelvetrees was an actress with real depth to her. She conveys the wistfulness and dreams of Frankie in those rare moments where she dares to let down her guard for a moment, and then suddenly slips into her assumed tough-gal mode which is her usual manner. The two personalities of Frankie battle it out as she vacillates between hope and despair throughout the story. She portrays Frankie as a truly pathetic abused waif. Johnnie is played by Ricardo Cortez, with heartless cunning and psychopathic intensity. He likes to kill people with his small knife. Marjorie Rambeau plays a washed-up elderly prostitute who is a hopeless alcoholic but who loves Frankie and tries to save her. She features in a unique twist in the last shot of the film, which adds a sudden and unexpected insight at the end of the story, which I cannot reveal. The ray of sunshine which offers Frankie the promise of escape comes in the form of a young cheery sailor played by Phillips Holmes, a very handsome and delightful fellow, who gets round Frankie's tough pretences by laughing at her and knows exactly how to draw her out and eventually gain her confidence. He wants to save her and take her away to a new life and marry her, but Johnnie cottons onto this and has other ideas, and turns to his usual solution, his knife. Will she or won't she escape? Will the film end as a tragedy or will everything turn out all right? Helen Twelvetrees is so entrancing as the waif Frankie that we really care. She was only 21 when she made this film, and by the age of 30, her career was over. She took an overdose of pills and died when she was only 49. She seems to have had an all too genuine and profound melancholy deep within her, which makes her performance shine with such pathos here. This film has remarkable beginning and end credits, with everything written in the sand and then repeatedly washed over and erased by the surf, which is very original and effective. The film is well worth seeing.

This isn't the safe, sanitised Cuba we see in HAVANA WIDOWS. No, this is a much darker, dirtier and dangerous place. Hugely underrated director Tay Garnett has gone for gritty, grimy realism here - this is certainly not the sort of place you'd find Joan Blondell! It's surprising therefore to find Helen Twelvetrees, the epitome of purity and sweetness here as one of the seasoned prostitutes servicing and fleecing the sailors on shore leave.

She might not have been as great an actress as some of her contemporaries but in this she is absolutely magnificent. Her dissolute character is so believably real and yet her face is so impossibly pretty and innocent that your brain explodes with the cognitive dichotomy of it all. If you've only ever seen her playing stereotypically mistreated young women constantly crying, this will be a revelation for you. Had she not got pigeonholed she might have been a great actress - who knows!

Interestingly this is one of those rare talkies made by Pathe before it was taken over by RKO. It's a superbly well made film and had the Depression not happened just as they were getting going, Pathe might have been one of the great studios - who knows!

Besides Helen Twelvetrees' remarkable acting masterclass, Ricardo Cortez is also great as her semi-psychopathic pimp. You can see why Garnett used him a year later to play the crazy, evil mob boss in his impressive gangster picture, BAD COMPANY. Overall, this is a surprisingly exciting and quite riveting drama. Some commentators have said that there's an annoying amount of irritating comedy - I disagree, I think the blend is just right making this a very entertaining film.

It's a variation of the Frankie and Johnny story with the same cast names and even a Nelly thrown into the mix courtesy of Thelma Todd. Bad guy Ricardo Cortez (Johnny) pimps out Helen Twelvetrees (Frankie) to steal from drunken visitors in a seedy dive on the waterfront in somewhere like Cuba. It's a rough bar that is frequented by sailors and people generally looking for a fight. Occasionally, if a customer gets too friendly with Helen, then that's the end for him - knife in the back.

As in the song - "He was her man and he was doing her wrong" - Cortez has a friendship with Todd. He doesn't seem too nice a person when he's around Twelvetrees. Into the bar strolls a new crop of sailors headed by Phillips Holmes (Dan) and it's love at first sight on his part leading him to dangerously pursue this 'taken' woman.

This film has a gritty, seedy setting which holds an interest with realistic characters. However, the film has to lose marks on 2 counts especially. The first is Phillips Holmes and his attempt to portray a tough sailor. He really doesn't need to puff out his chest when he walks. It's the blueprint for Popeye. Secondly, there was way too much attempted comedy with drunken sailors that just got tiresome. The women, in particular, in this film are good so it's a special mention for Twelvetrees, Todd and drunken lush Marjorie Rambeau (Annie).