Skyscraper Souls

Skyscraper Souls is a witty and provocative look at business in the early 1930's. Full of risque and snappy comments, the movie is a fascinating look at a building and how its builder worked to keep it.

The cast is brilliant led by Warren William as an astute but unscrupulous banker. Verree Teasdale is very sharp as Williams' lovely adminstrative aide. Her mature attitude towards Williams' advances is a highlight of the picture. She accepts that she will never be his wife, even though she loves him. He is too busy maintaining appearences, even though his wife and he are never together. Hedda Hopper is delightful as the wife who maintains a relationship from another continent, but comes to see William for money from time to time.

A subplot involving Maureen O'Sullivan and Norman Foster is rather annoying.

There is social commentary here as the workers in the building attempt to make a living while the big businessmen play with millions of dollars.

The movie is sexy too. A scene with Jean Hersholt and Anita Page is very suggestive as are some scenes with Warren William and Verree Teasdale.

Overall, the movie is very interesting and moves very quickly.

Utterly ruthless & immoral, the owner of New York's tallest building plots & schemes to keep control of his creation, trampling upon anyone who gets in his way. Others working in the great colossus also live lives of drama & everyday excitement. All these SKYSCRAPER SOULS will soon find themselves bound together by greed, lust, betrayal, suicide & murder.

Practically screaming its pre-Production Code status, this neglected film is rather fascinating in the risqué development of its plot. Sex, both leering & suggested, plays an important role in the story. By making its hero a man both charming & completely treacherous, open to any underhand suggestion, it makes a lie out of Louis B. Mayer's assertion that all of MGM's product was family friendly. Even today, this is potent, powerful material. And absolutely engaging.

Warren William is almost distressingly good as the unscrupulous building owner, around whom much of the action revolves. His blunt dishonesty almost makes chicanery respectable.

The rest of the cast is equally proficient:

Maureen O'Sullivan as a naive young secretary lusted over by William & loved by brash bank clerk Norman Foster.

Gregory Ratoff, hilarious as a harried dressmaker.

Anita Page as a brash prostitute/model beloved by noble jeweler Jean Hersholt.

Verree Teasdale, William's mistress for 12 years, finally pushed to the breaking point.

Wallace Ford as a radio announcer, tragically driven to desperation by his love of unhappily married Helen Coburn.

George Barbier as a jolly fat debauchee, one of William's eventual financial victims.

And Hedda Hopper, William's absent, knowing wife - very content with his money, but not his company.

Movie mavens will also recognize Billy Gilbert as a lobby cigarette stand owner, Edward Brophy & Doris Lloyd as the man & woman in the elevator.

This Depression-era melodrama from MGM in the '30s contains several strong performances and interesting plot elements that place it among the better "big business" stories that Hollywood loves to make about ethics and morality. It's a forerunner of other such films, such as "Executive Suite" but has even more bite despite some of the dated elements of the story.

WARREN WILLIAM is convincing as the owner of the world's tallest building who will stoop to anything to keep control of his luxurious hi-rise, which includes a swanky bachelor pad for his affair with his personal assistant (VERREE TEASDALE).

A subplot involves the affair between MAUREEN O'SULLIVAN and a man in hot pursuit (NORMAN FOSTER), a bank teller who has trouble keeping her to himself once she is noticed by the wealthy William. It's one of O'Sullivan's best early roles (before she became Tarzan's Jane), and she does extremely well in it except for the way she jabs away at the keyboard as an office typist, which is almost laughable.

Several strands of plot are smoothly entwined and lead toward a very melodramatic ending involving Warren William and his mistress. HEDDA HOPPER pops in once in awhile as William's wife who is always looking for a handout so she can keep a villa in Italy.

After a shocking conclusion, there's a bittersweet ending for O'Sullivan and Foster. His extroverted character is a bit annoying at times but he certainly is a lively presence during the proceedings.

This is an undiscovered gem worth seeking out if you're a fan of stories about big business. It's a sort of "Grand Hotel" in its own way.

Back in the early 30's, Maureen O'Sullivan was the quintessential "good girl who wants to be bad", which is to say, she seemed prim and proper on the surface, but a powerfully sexy woman lay right underneath that surface, who would only come out for the right guy--or sometimes the wrong guy.

Though she is not exactly the star of this movie, she did get second billing after Warren William, in spite of being so new to the motion picture biz. This was probably in response to her having appeared as Jane in the first Weissmuller Tarzan film, not long before. That remains her best role--she is essentially the protagonist in the first two Tarzan movies--she's the one who is changing, casting aside the sexual mores of her society, and joining Tarzan in his idyllic state of noble savagery.

In the urban jungle of "Skyscraper Souls", she plays a less idyllic character, wanting to enjoy both sexual passion and social respectability, along with a decent income. Nobody can offer her everything she wants, so she's left with two imperfect choices--the poor young clerk she likes, who will offer marriage. And the sexy ruthless tycoon she REALLY likes, who will take her as his "ward" (that is to say, his mistress) and possibly cast her aside in a decade or so, assuming he isn't too old to care by that point. Of course, she'd be set for life, even if that happened. But by the point in the film where she gives into him, she almost seems past caring about that. She's tried to follow the rules, and society has only penalized her for it. The man who supposedly loves her doesn't trust her, and she's feeling powerfully drawn to David Dwight, who understands her perfectly, and doesn't stand in judgment of anybody--least of all himself. He's a bastard, who destroys people to get what he wants--but he doesn't pretend to be anything else. He doesn't care about respectability or morality. Very few rich men truly do, but most like to at least pretend.

This pre-code film has it both ways, regarding the denouement of this particular sub-plot--you can, if you wish, believe that Lynn is saved from the proverbial Fate Worse Than Death, by the not entirely selfless intervention of her friend, Dwight's former mistress. But in truth, a number of days have passed since Lynn gave in to Dwight's advances, she seems awfully comfortable in his embrace, she's wearing clothes he bought for her, and is obviously living in his penthouse. Dwight is not the kind of man who is going to wait until he gets her on the yacht to have his pleasure. He's already gotten what he--and she--wanted. Even in the pre-code era, this is a bit too subversive, which is why the movie deftly clouds the issue of whether they've had sex or not. But there can be no doubt of her eagerness--by this point, she wouldn't leave Dwight for the bank clerk, even if the clerk could offer her everything she asked for.

With Dwight gone, she'll marry her bank clerk, and raise a family, and perhaps count herself lucky to have gotten to experience a bit of the high life before settling down. But one wonders if the bank clerk will end up wondering why their first kid doesn't look like him. I'm reading a great deal into this, of course. I really hated the bank clerk, btw.

;-)

Made before "the code" removed all "offensive" material from American movies, Skyscraper Souls combines the social commentary of a Warner Bros. film, the class of an MGM production, and the sleaziness of a pulp novel. Warren Williams, a great but sadly overlooked actor, is perfect as the nice-but-slimy David Dwight, bank entrepreneur, who has built a 100-story monument to himself and doesn't have the $30,000,000 to pay for it. How he gets the money and what happens to those who unwittingly fall into his trap, constitutes the main thrust of the narrative. The film is full of diverse characters, all trying to eek out a living in the towering Dwight Bldg. The many plotlines cross and criss-cross, and the end is more realistic than one would expect from a "Hollywood" film. Watch for it on TCM, or on Laserdisc, in the "Forbidden Hollywood" set.