Frank Capra (1930)

The emotional complexity that pre-Code Hollywood talkies can achieve comes as a pleasant surprise each time you experience it – as this Frank Capra romantic melodrama demonstrates.  Jerry Strong (Ralph Graves), the artist son of a railroad-building tycoon, meets ‘party girl’ (prostitute) Kay Arnold (Barbara Stanwyck) and offers her a job as model for his next painting, entitled ‘Hope’.  Intent on bringing out her ‘true’ beauty, Jerry starts the first portrait sitting by wiping the make-up off her face.  His roué friend Bill Standish (Lowell Sherman) sees her differently and invites Kay to accompany him on a cruise to Havana.  She says no – she’s already falling in love with Jerry, though bitterly regretting that the life she’s led makes it impossible for him to love her back.  She’s wrong about that, of course, but Jerry’s father (George Fawcett) is having none of it:  he tells his son never again to darken his door if he marries Kay.  Jerry’s mother (Nance O’Neil) pays her a visit, appealing to the girl (which amounts to instructing her) to give Jerry up.  The desolate Kay accepts the inevitable and phones Standish to tell him she’s changed her mind about Havana.  The climax is a desperate race against time, as Kay prepares to set sail with Standish, while her friend, flatmate and fellow party girl Dot Lamar (Marie Prevost) tries to contact Jerry.

Ladies of Leisure, adapted by Jo Swerling from a 1924 stage play (Ladies of the Evening by Milton Herbert Gropper), was the picture that launched Barbara Stanwyck’s career in cinema, and it’s not difficult to see why.  Harder to understand is how, although she was a major Hollywood star for the next twenty years, Stanwyck seems never to have been recognised as the outstanding film actress of her generation.  (She, Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis, by the way, were born within twelve months of each other.)   Maybe long retrospect is necessary to appreciate Stanwyck’s uniqueness.  Watching her now, you get why contemporary audiences found her exciting and involving but wonder too that the characters she creates are so naturally believable.  Her acting isn’t in the least dated.

The film begins with a party in Jerry Strong’s New York penthouse/studio but the frenetic goings-on are too much for the host, who slips away.  He drives out of the city to a stretch of water.  There he meets Kay, also escaping from a party, on a yacht.  The opening sequence, as you watch, seems a bit overdone but the hedonistic whirl lodges in your mind:  it’s something the romance between Kay and Jerry must transcend.  His painting of her counterpoints a particular detail of the penthouse gathering:  girls in dresses cut low at the back, Bill Standish, posing as an artist, humorously applying paint to the exposed flesh.  Ladies of Leisure comes into dramatic focus the moment Kay appears, thanks to what became one of Stanwyck’s trademarks.  Whatever her characters are doing, they seem to take it seriously.  This doesn’t mean she can’t be light or funny but she inhabits a role so completely that you never feel she’s pretending.

The solidly handsome Ralph Graves is an interesting partner for Stanwyck.  He’s nothing like as emotionally fine-tuned but his limited expressiveness actually serves to make Jerry mysterious and capable of surprise.   Frank Capra stages the events of the first night that Jerry and Kay spend under the same roof with wit and sensitivity.  On the couch in his studio, she’s too excited to sleep but pretends to do so when he comes from his bedroom to put a quilt over her in case she’s cold.  As soon as he’s gone, Kay opens her eyes and puts the quilt to her lips – a remarkable moment.   The two lead performances are complemented by strong supporting turns from George Fawcett, Nance O’Neil, Lowell Sherman and Marie Prevost.  Both the latter have first-rate, again very natural, comic timing.  Sherman’s, as the inveterate pleasure-seeker Standish, is precise but easy.  Prevost makes Dot’s appetite, for food as well as sex, very amusing.  In the closing stages, she climbs many flights of stairs in her attempt to get a message to Jerry, and is breathless and exhausted as a result.  Dot’s plumpness is no longer a joke.

This film travels quite a tonal distance.  Jerry’s mother’s semblance of nobility gives her visit to Kay added offensive bite – and it’s striking how often Capra strengthens mood by not using music as a superfluous guide.  As a series of events, the last few minutes are absurdly melodramatic, culminating in Kay’s attempted suicide:  she jumps into the sea just as a telegram for her from Jerry has been received by the cruise ship.  Yet the combination of Stanwyck’s acting and Capra’s direction gives the melodrama tragic substance.   As Kay gazes out at the dark ocean, there’s a starry night sky behind her.   The composition makes for a reminder of the water separating her and Jerry when they first caught sight of each other but the water and the distance between them is vast now.  Capra  evokes too the prelude to her night in his studio, on the penthouse balcony – Jerry looking at the stars above, Kay at the lights of New York below.   In the closing scene, she wakes in hospital and he’s at her bedside, telling her everything is going to be all right.  This might seem not only a regulation happy ending but so brief as to be a perfunctory one.  Yet the brevity is right – you wouldn’t want, perhaps couldn’t bear, much more.  The authentic intensity that the film’s star-to-be has generated leaves you spent.

1 February 2019