Bad Girl (1931)

Borzage is a film-maker whose reputation has ebbed and flowed quite dramatically over time. And perhaps not surprisingly. His work represents, even more clearly than that of Ford or Capra, a combination of all that is the best and all that is the worst about US film.In the late twenties and early thirties, he was looked at as the brightest hope of the US cinema and probably deserves the accolade of being the winner of more undeserved Oscars than anyone else before the advent of Ang Lee. Subsequently his reputation plummeted (as did the quality of his films) but he is now once again riding relatively high in critical esteem, at least in respect of his early films.But even these are a vary mixed bunch. There are Borzage films I greatly admire, there are several which i Find irritating (most of the Gaynor-Farrell films) but this particular 1931 film I absolutely detest.Its reputation for "realism" (in the sense of naturalism, that rare bird in US cinema) is entirely unjustified. Any comparison for instance with King Vidor's excellent The Crowd (1928) reveals immediately how spurious and fake the "realism" is here. One reviewer talks of ordinary people not being treated with "condescension". They are in fact treated here as complete and utter idiots and the entire plot revolves around perfectly stupid misunderstandings that are only possible because of the characters' extraordinary obtuseness. This is in turn set off by a fake naivety which is supposed to be charming but is just cringe-makingly sentimental. I have difficulty in imagining any treatment that could be more condescending...and this makes it, to my mind, not just irritatingly sentimentalised (as in the case of the Gaynor-Farrell films) but virtually a kind of pornography that demeans everybody associated with it.That such a film should be set during an economic depression and, ignoring any of the real problems of the time, should concentrate on such trivialities may in part be due to the fact, as another reviewer points out, to the fact that the original novel was written some eight years earlier but, in the context of 1931, it is absolutely grotesque although typical enough of the US cinema's reaction to the depression.It is in part just the familiar Hollywood problem with "truth". While The Crowd was hated by the studios and unsuccessful with the public (in practice the first tends to condition the second rather than vice versa), this saccharine piece of junk won another Oscar for its director.

If there was ever a movie with a misleading title, this one is it. With the title, "Bad Girl," the fact that it's Pre-Code, and the movie poster showing a scantily-clad woman lounging in a chair with her arms raised, while a man leers suggestively over her shoulder – you think this movie is going to be about a woman of loose morals, like Jean Harlow or Marlene Dietrich.But it's not. Instead, it's a romantic melodrama that tells the story of a young married couple trying to make it through their first year of marriage during the Depression. Dorothy Haley (Sally Eiler) marries Eddie Collins (James Dunn), a tough talking "Noo Yawk" radio salesman, who is secretly a softie inside. In the movie's opening scenes, Dorothy is a streetwise dress model who easily parries the advances of men who make passes at her. But after she marries Eddie, she turns into an emotional girl with an overactive imagination. (When Eddie is late on their wedding day, Dorothy bursts into tears because she assumes he has deserted her.)Dorothy isn't really a "bad girl." She's just dumb as a box of rocks! Unfortunately, so is her husband. Eddie and Dorothy spend the movie trying to make each other happy, but they're both too stupid to realize they actually want the same things. This leads to an extended version of what Roger Ebert called the "Idiot Plot," where there are lame misunderstandings and the characters keep secrets from each other for no reason except that the plot requires it. If they would just tell each other those secrets, it would solve all their problems, but it would spoil the plot. It's called an "Idiot Plot" because the characters have to be idiots for it to work.Case in point. Soon after their marriage, Dorothy finds out she is pregnant. But Eddie has saved up $650 to open his own radio store. Not wanting him to spend his savings on her, Dorothy doesn't tell Eddie about the baby. Instead, she tells him she'd like to go back to work, to earn more money. From this, Eddie concludes she is unhappy living in their one-bedroom apartment. So he spends his $650 to buy them a big house and furniture, which Dorothy likes but didn't really want. Only then does she tell him she's pregnant.Now, this could have been handled as a variation on "The Gift of the Magi." But in the "Magi" story, the husband and wife actually learned something from their experience. Eddie and Dorothy learn nothing, and keep making the same dumb mistakes.Eddie and Dorothy each wrongly assume the other one doesn't want the baby, which results in more problems with their marriage. When Dorothy decides she needs an expensive doctor, Eddie tries to earn the money as a boxer. When he comes home with bandages on his face, Dorothy accuses him of going to a speakeasy and getting in a fight, instead of staying home with her. For some reason, Eddie doesn't tell her about the money he's won, or that he got her the doctor she wanted.(On a side note, the movie's one great scene is when Eddie steps into the ring with the Champ. He gets beaten up pretty bad and is about to go down when he whispers to the Champ that he needs the money because his wife is having a baby. The Champ says, "Well, why didn't ya say so? I got kids of my own!" He then literally carries Eddie around the ring for a few more rounds, all the time talking about his own kids.)If this story had been handled comically, it might have been a forerunner of "The Honeymooners" and "The Flintstones." (There were times when Eddie reminded me of Ralph Kramden.) Instead, we get a sappy romantic melodrama that is instantly forgettable.It's surprising that Frank Borzage won an Oscar for directing this claptrap, and that the lame screenplay won an Oscar as well. Borzage made better films than this (see "Seventh Heaven" and "Street Angel"), and there were better directed films released in 1931-32 (such as Charlie Chaplin's "City Lights," James Whale's "Frankenstein," William Wellman's "The Public Enemy," and Edmund Goulding's "Grand Hotel"). But AMPAS was young then, and young organizations are bound to make mistakes.

Note: some scenes described in detail.As usual for Borzage, this is full of sentiment, and the details of the plot are deadly. Never was the development of misunderstandings between two inarticulate people more aggressively, one might say more ruthlessly, pursued. When they're not playing "Gift of the Magi" (he giving up the dream of his own radio store for the big apartment he thinks she wants), they're busy each thinking that the other doesn't really want the baby. And how could Borzage resist milking the maternity ward scene, with its inevitable ethnic cross-section, older woman, and troubled mother. And here's another version of that typical pre-Code era film pair, the beautiful girl and the unhandsome blow-hard boob.All that said, this is still a very good film in spite of itself, certainly deserving of its Academy Award nomination for Best Picture. Borzage constantly redeems himself at the worst moments. A prime example: the evening before the baby's due Jimmy goes out to fight four rounds of preliminaries at $10 a round to pay the doctor. Sally is lying at home, convinced that he's with his drunken friends, or worse, and no longer loves her. Dunn's opponent is a mean-looking, cynical, paunchy guy who's about to knock him out in the second round. Oh, the ironic cross-cutting: he's getting the crap beat out of him, while she lies in bed, anxious and bitter. But, in a clinch, Jimmy begs the pug not to knock him out because his wife's going to have a baby. Why didn't you say so, says the obliging pug, I've got two of my own. In an amusing moment they chat away while pretending to lambaste each other. This takes the curse off the sentimental plot maneuvering.And there are a lot of other fine sequences, too. The film starts with Eilers in a fancy wedding gown, being attended to by a dresser. She's so nervous, she tells best-friend Gombell, who's dressed as a bridesmaid. As they do the formal bride's walk through the phalanx of bridesmaids, in the corner of the screen one sees part of a tray of dirty dishes being carried by a waiter. Gradually the camera pulls back to show that they're modeling the gowns for a bunch of lecherous buyers. Then they go to Luna Park (nice shots of the park). Throughout these early scenes there are plenty of sharp pre-Code wisecracks about how men only have one thing on their minds. Funny, breezy stuff. They meet Dunn on the ferry on the way home, the first guy that doesn't make a pass. The scene shifts to the couple sitting at the foot of her rooming-house stairwell. As they talk, an old hen-pecked lush comes down the stairs, and an older woman uses the hall phone to tell her sister that their mother has just died. That may be pouring the milieu on a bit thick, Borzage style, but this scene is beautifully played by Eilers and by the older woman and is quite affecting. Later, when Eilers stays in Dunn's room (no hanky-panky, it seems) and he asks her to marry him, her brother kicks her out of the house, and Gombell, the brother's gal, walks too. (Single-mom Gombell's little boy is a terror. In the morning he won't scram: "I want to see Dotty get out of bed.") Sally is sure that Jimmy will desert her at the alter, and that's the beginning of all the tear-jerking plot elements.But the film goes beyond those elements with a richness of detail, a generous painting of daily life in the city during the Depression. And, when all's said and done, what really makes the film, and where Borzage ultimately redeems himself, is in the performances. Eilers, who somehow never got the recognition she deserved, is beautiful and gives a strong, sensitive, emotional performance--for my money a more appealing one than most of Janet Gaynor's work for Borzage. Gombell, another undervalued thirties player, is really fine as the tough but good-natured pal, who doesn't let Dunn's dislike of her color her opinion of him as a good husband for Eilers. Her performance goes beyond the requirements of the script in very subtle ways. And Dunn, well, he plays the typical early-thirties boob of a husband, but even he has a bravura scene when he breaks down while having to beg the expensive doctor to handle his wife's childbirth. Borzage films are always full of sentiment, but not always honest sentiment. This scene with the doctor is full of sentiment, but it's honestly handled, and one can say the same for the whole film.

Unfortunately, this is apparently a very scarce film, not available on VHS or DVD, and seldom if ever broadcast. However, as a fan of Vina Delmar I have read the novel upon which the film is based, and must point out that the story takes place in 1923. This was the flapper era, the roaring twenties, the jazz age . . . and the era of Prohibition!A very different period from that of the Great Depression, which began in 1929, and was two years old when the film was made.Whether the story line was changed to place the story in Depression-era New York instead of Roaring Twenties New York, is interesting to consider. I would dearly love to see this film, and to see how well it lives up to the very fine novel by Vina Delmar, BAD GIRL.Regis Hardy