La boule rouge

"Blood Money" is a fascinating precode - what else can you say about a film that has Judith Anderson in a glamor role? And an ingénue who longs for S&M to boot.

This 1933 film concerns a bail bondsman named Bill Bailey (George Bancroft) who's been helping out the mob for years. He falls for a pretty shoplifter named Elaine (Frances Dee) - she's actually slumming, as she's from a wealthy family.

This leaves Bailey's girlfriend, club owner Ruby (Anderson) in the lurch. She's the woman responsible for his success, helping him out when he was thrown off of the police force.

However, Elaine (who would follow any man who thrashed her around like a dog, says she) steals some bonds instead of delivering them to the appropriate place, thereby setting up Bailey as a mob target and getting his brother-in-law in deep trouble with the law. Ruby believes he's responsible for her brother's problems, and has a hit put out on him.

The acting is over the top, the dialogue is rough and filled with sexual innuendos, the atmosphere is sleazy - it's pre-code all right. I read a transcript of an interview with Joel McCrea (intended to be for a biography that wasn't written) and he kept referring to "Mother" - I finally realized that he didn't call his wife, Frances Dee, "mother" - he was referring to her that way while talking to one of his sons, who was conducting the interview. As the promiscuous, dying to be hit ingénue, she wasn't very motherly in this.

This is a no-miss if only to see Judith Anderson in a gown and jewels hanging out with mobsters and Frances Dee as something other than a pretty goody-two-shoes.

Wow! Were do you start with this one?

Director Rowland Brown (soon blackballed in Hollywood for striking a producer) certainly confirms his reputation for style with this racy little pre-Code gem, in which an impossibly youthful Judith Anderson and Frances Dee are both revelations: the former as a supple, sleepy-eyed, smoky-voiced dame draped in a succession of slinky backless thirties evening gowns; the latter as a spoilt little minx who in Miss Dee's own words is a "a kleptomaniac, a nymphomaniac, and anything in between".

Great fun.

All the critics and all the old movie books rate this highly, personally I found it awful. Awful and very boring. It's not so much a black and white film, more of a dull, grey nebulous lump of fog. The premise of Rowland Brown's story actually sounds really exciting and Rowland Brown, who also directed this, was a pretty decent filmmaker so this should have been a thrilling, exhilarating picture - but wasn't.

What made this so interminably dull was the acting. It's not bad acting, it's just dull, flat and lifeless. George Bancroft's character is one of the dullest, most characterless leads I've ever seen. You simply couldn't care less about him. Will he get shot? Will he find happiness? Nobody cares!

Besides Mrs Danvers badly impersonating Mae West, the other female lead is Frances Dee. Her character, the obligatory millionaire's daughter, is so poorly written, so poorly explored it lacks any depth or credibility. She is is ridiculously unreal.

Like with BROADWAY THOUGH A KEYHOLE and BORN TO BE BAD, this picture which is one of the very first films to come out of that brand new studio: Twentieth Century Pictures. It seemed like they hadn't quite found their mojo. Even with their big bank account, their talent and enthusiasm, the teamwork hadn't seemed to have quite gelled yet.

This is another case of a film that turned out to be different than I had expected: in fact, I thought it would be a gangster picture – which is why I watched it following 2 Josef von Sternberg genre entries that happened to feature the same star, George Bancroft! Still, it does concern a racket of some kind – since the protagonist is a leading bail-bondsman with an ability to pull strings where and when required (if anything, this was an area of work which was hardly ever touched by cinema and certainly not at this point!).

The film came at the tail-end of the "Pre-Code" era, but it offers plenty of salacious elements – notably a gratuitous semi-nude Hawaiian dance and the uninhibited character of Frances Dee (which she herself described as "a masochistic nymphomaniacal kleptomaniac"!). Ironically, the lovely actress – soon to marry Joel McCrea and perhaps best-known for the Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur horror classic I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (1943) – had just come off something from the opposite end of the spectrum, the David O. Selznick/George Cukor adaptation of the literary classic LITTLE WOMEN (1933)! Anyway, as had been the case with all 3 Bancroft vehicles I watched prior to this (there was also yet another Sternberg title, albeit not genre-related), he is played up to be something of a ladies' man (whereas a review of THUNDERBOLT [1929] had described his physical appearance as "repellent"!) but, at least, here he eventually settles down with someone closer to his type and age i.e. Judith Anderson in an early – and atypically glamorous – role (she is the owner of a speak-easy which comes equipped with a chanteuse whose vocal range takes in both Mae West and Al Jolson!).

Another important character is Anderson's younger brother, an unrepentant criminal whom Bancroft is often required to bail-out for the woman's sake. However, the situation is complicated when Dee (another of the hero's clients) enters the picture – Bancroft neglects Anderson for her but, after she meets the "exciting" young man herself, begins an affair with him behind her 'protector''s back! In a complex turn-of-events, the protagonist himself becomes a pariah and is marked for death (via an exploding billiard-ball a' la Buster Keaton's SHERLOCK JR. [1924]!) by the city's gangland factions – with Anderson's consent! – but, ultimately, she sees the error of her ways and races against time to stop the attempt (suspense is admirably built here through cross-cutting, with her car even getting involved in a wreck!). The finale sees the two getting back together…while Dee bumps into a girl who had been practically ravaged by her proposed employer when answering an ad and, ever a glutton for punishment, she takes up the call herself!

Finally, this is the first of 3 pictures by Rowland Brown (who seems to favor shooting from odd angles!) I will be watching over the course of succeeding days – the others are the thrillers QUICK MILLIONS (1931) and HELL'S HIGHWAY (1932); incidentally, he would make another film with Bancroft i.e. the gangster milestone ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES (1938) – by which time, however, both had been demoted: the director to co-scriptwriter status and the star to a supporting role!

One of the most interesting of the Fox pre-code talkies, for several reasons: 1) It has nice girl Frances Dee as a perverse and masochistic society miss, snarling and hip-shaking and shocking the elite. 2) It has Judith Anderson, in a swell backless evening gown, playing a moll, against-the-grain casting of the most inspired sort, even if the movie never explains her high-tone Brit accent vs. her brother's American Midwest elongated vowels. (She also played a gangster years later in "Lady Scarface," but it's a much less interesting film.) 3) You get to see Blossom Seeley, the great vaudevillian, sob a couple of torch songs, and she's the real thing. 4), and most fascinatingly: George Bancroft plays a no- better-than-he-should-be bail bondsman who works both sides of the street and is terribly corrupt, yet the movie likes him, we like him, and he doesn't have to repent for it. It's lively and violent and funny, and, unlike so many Fox early talkies, it has the fast pace of a good Paramount or Warners flick from the same period.