Frances Dee movies: From 'An American Tragedy' to 'Four Faces West' Frances Dee began her film career at the dawn of the sound era, going from extra to leading lady within a matter of months. Her rapid ascencion came about thanks to Maurice Chevalier, who got her as his romantic interested in Ludwig Berger's 1930 romantic comedy Playboy of Paris. Despite her dark(-haired) good looks and pleasant personality, Dee's Hollywood career never quite progressed to major – or even moderate – stardom. But she was to remain a busy leading lady for about 15 years. Tonight, Turner Classic Movies is showing seven Frances Dee films, ranging from heavy dramas to Westerns. Unfortunately missing is one of Dee's most curious efforts, the raunchy pre-Coder Blood Money, which possibly features her most unusual – and most effective – performance. Having said that, William A. Wellman's Love Is a Racket is a worthwhile subsitute, though the...
- 5/18/2017
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
Continuing the tradition of brisk pre-Code films, Joel McCrea’s occasional appearances in Gregory La Cava’s 1933 Bed of Roses serve as strange moral medium between the wanton hedonism of the lead Constance Bennett and the upcoming censorship of the era. Screenwriter Wanda Tuchock’s story of jail-hopping prostitutes-on-the-side seems like a victory lap for vice-ridden cinematic world of the early 30s, including flippant talk of suicide, heavily implied sex, liberal boozing, and poking fun at previous attempts of government sponsored moral judgment (“The Eighteenth Amendment is a law, and as a law should be enforced until it stops being a law”). The film begins in a prison as Bennett’s Lorry Evans and partner-in-crime Minnie (Pert Kelton) walk out of their cells, trash-talking life outside in radio-ready cadence and street-ready slang. They have short hair, hats tipped on the side of their head (I assume gravity worked differently in...
- 6/5/2015
- by Zach Lewis
- MUBI
Right up until the end of the Production Code era of filmmaking in 1930’s Hollywood, the various studios churned out stories that pushed the boundaries of transgression for audiences everywhere. These films may seem more than a little tame today, but what these films did for the time cannot be overstated. Women were allowed to have fun, without having to be punished afterwards for it. They could be unashamedly free with their sexuality. These films looked at their promiscuity as a concrete normality; not as something that in any way needed to be fixed. The early thirties in studio filmmaking is a special and thoroughly fun era. In another Warner Archives DVD release, Finishing School, released in 1934, mere months before the Code began to be enforced, is just one example of the many forgotten or overlooked films from that era.
With such an extraordinarily large number of films being released by studios each year,...
With such an extraordinarily large number of films being released by studios each year,...
- 4/7/2011
- by Catherine Stebbins
- CriterionCast
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