La fille de l'enfer

Plot-- A prostitute thinks she killed her cunning corrupter and flees to a Caribbean island to escape extradition, but not before marrying her departing sailor true love. Trouble is the island's full of lecherous men bent on nailing her, the island's only white woman. So should she risk staying or risk leaving.

That opening scene's a grabber that fairly shouts 'prostitute'. If it didn't help bring down Production Code censorship (1934), I don't know what would. Except for the goofy antics of the unshaven oglers, this 1931 cheapo almost amounts to a sleeper. Actress Mackail delivers the tough gal with soul, in spades. Too bad she's so obscure, her acting career mainly in silents. Here, she fends off the many lecherous men in convincing Joan Blondell style. And catch Charles Middleton in a surprisingly nuanced role; that is, a few years before his Ming The Merciless menaced Flash Gordon's serial universe. The movie's also distinguished by a surprise ending. But keep in mind that the subtext is about crime and redemption, along with true love. These themes are interwoven in subtle fashion such that the conclusion may prompt some thought.

Anyway, it's one of legendary director Wellman's early talkies, which in characteristic fashion he doesn't sentimentalize. And, oh yes, maybe my favorite scene is when the true lovers conduct their spooning through a fortunate crack in a shipping crate. Good thing she could get out before the cranes came. Note too, that the lovers' marriage is conducted without benefit of presiding cleric or official marriage certificate. Yet the couple treat their enduring love as all the ceremony they need. Thus church and government are bypassed as unnecessary despite long tradition and heavy legalisms. No wonder the screenplay is pre-Code. All in all, the 70-minutes is definitely meaningful and worth thinking about. So catch up with it despite the long ago era.

A case can be made that director William Wellman did his best work at Warner Bros-First National from 1931-1933. "Safe in Hell" is a prime example. There isn't much plot in this saga of a "bad" woman (Mackaill) redeemed by love, but the atmosphere of sin, desperation , and hope is efficiently evoked. The compositions are continually inventive, and the camera movements are as energizing as Wellman pulled off the same year in "The Public Enemy". He also coaxed fine work from the beautiful Mackaill; it's telling that this tough guy director seemed to work so well with actresses. In his Warner Bros. tenure, Wellman did great films with Barbara Stanwyck, Loretta Young, and Ruth Chatterton, too. Look up his resume, and check out the films.

William Wellman makes the most of pre code freedom in the dark and cynical Safe in Hell. With an on the run hooker in the lead hiding out on a rogues island with a disreputable bunch of sex starved thieves and wheeler dealers Wellman serves up ample helpings of society's underbelly with some effective and subversive pokes at society in general.

New Orleans "escort" Gilda has to blow town fast after possibly committing murder and burning down an apartment building. Her seaman lover spirits her away to an island until things cool off where she shares a fleabag hotel with some male dregs of humanity. Her lover plans to return and marry her but the local law and the hangman who also has designs on her confiscates his letters giving her the feeling she's been deserted. Keeping the boys at arms length most of the picture she is forced to shoot and kill one of the miscreants. Found innocent of murder she must nevertheless do some time on the weapons charge thus delivering her into the grimy paws of the hangman.

Nearly all the white male characters in Safe in Hell are low lifes of the first order. Criminals without conscience, lusting voyeurs they all want a piece of the action and when Gilda feels she's gotten the brush off she lowers her guard. With a telling sense of irony Wellman provocatively juxtaposes their loutishness with the films only refined respectful well spoken character, a black porter (Clarence Muse) as well as infer miscegenation with the inn keeper (Nina Mae McKinney) who dazzles the boys with a touch of Bessie Smith.

Dorothy Mackaill plays Gilda with a glamor less tragic resignation as well as most of the hard boiled molls permeating early sound poverty row films. Morgan Wallace's lascivious Mr. Bruno the hangman is convincing enough to makes Gilda's rash action that determines her fate certainly understandable as Wellman's uncompromising take leaves her little alternative.

I've wanted to see Safe in Hell for a long time, thinking it was some kind of archetypal pre-Code experience, and it's tawdry enough but fatally slow. Dorothy Mackaill plays a woman who was left behind by her sailor boyfriend, turned to prostitution, and ends up killing a john she apparently had a bad experience with before the movie started. That's the first ten minutes or so, and it's pretty good. Then the sailor boyfriend, who gets over the prostitution and murder stuff pretty quickly, helps her escape and, making the same mistake with his not very strong-willed girlfriend a second time, plops her alone on a miserable little island with a group of exiled lowlifes who sit in rattan chairs all day ogling her.

This proves, ultimately if not convincingly, irresistible, and once she falls the second time, it's a short walk from there to being executed for a crime she didn't commit, and trying hard to keep the secret of her sorry end from her sailor boyfriend, who really needs to find a nice gal he can leave alone somewhere for five minutes without her killing somebody, regardless of the circumstances.

I think the island stuff was originally a play, in the far-east-sleaze mode of Kongo, Shanghai Gesture, etc., and if so I think there must have been more action in it than made it to the screen, because there's a lot of suggestion that something's going to happen, but not much actually does. Mackaill is all right, she's certainly attractive and doesn't object to a pre-Code wardrobe, but she doesn't make as strong an impression as, say, Barbara Stanwyck, who was evidently Wellman's first choice.

The strongest impression is made by Nina Mae McKinney and Clarence Muse as the hotel proprietors, who exude a warmth and conviviality in their scenes that seems to have come from a different movie (and suggests that the Hell of the island was brought there by its white visitors, not intrinsic to the place). McKinney, the wonderful star of the very early sound Hallelujah!, even gets to sing a song, in the only on-screen appearance of her MGM contract (loaned out to Warners). It makes you a wish for a very different movie about her character, rather than Mackaill's.

Although this film directed by the versatile William Wellman is not essentially different from many other fallen women pictures of the early talkie era, it has elements that lift it out of the ordinary. For contemporary viewers it's an opportunity to see Dorothy Mackaill in a starring role. She was a beautiful and self-possessed actress whose career came and went too quickly. At times she looks so much like Marion Davies that you could easily mistake them for twins. Here she plays a prostitute fleeing the law with a young fellow who loves her. He deposits her in a hotel on a steamy Caribbean island inhabited by escaped male criminals. There is the appealing shock of seeing two African-American actors actually speaking and behaving in a dignified and even admirable manner: Nina Mae MacKinney and Clarence Muse as a hotel proprietress and porter, respectively. Muse speaks the King's English better than the blonde leading lady and comports himself in a far more civilized manner than any of the white men. MacKinney is spectacular. She holds her own no matter who she is playing against and even sings a spirited round of "Sleepy Time Down South" as she pours wine for a large table of diners. Another case of wasted talent in the old Hollywood days.