Kolker, Henry

TCM Archives - Forbidden Hollywood Collection, Vol. 1 (Waterloo Bridge [1931] / Baby Face / Red-Headed Woman)

Here are three films that couldn't and wouldn't have been made at any other time. Contrary to popular belief, the history of Hollywood permissiveness, what filmmakers could "get away with" on screen, is not a steadily rising graph from puritanical early days to the party-hearty present. In the early 1930s, a national mood of shock over the stock market crash and impatience with Prohibition licensed a relaxation of the movie industry's self-censorship policies. Sexuality--always a driving force in movie plots and characterizations, even when repressed--became a more explicit presence, with costuming that sometimes pushed the envelope for exposure of epidermis and dialogue that could be shockingly blunt.

Baby Face (1933) was made at Warner Bros., the golden-age studio with the grittiest style and the most street cred. The gutsy Barbara Stanwyck stars as a young woman from a factory town who hops a boxcar to the big city and sleeps her way to the top--a progress famously indexed by a camera ascending floor by floor outside a Gotham office building as she trades up, one corporate suitor after another. No other major-studio film was more explicit about sex as a tool and a commodity, yetBaby Face is curiously less sexy than any number of movies that weren't so outspoken about it. This TCM collection features both the theatrical-release version familiar for decades and a recently rediscovered preview version that is markedly superior, runs five minutes longer, and includes more sexual liaisons. It also happily lacks an absurd final scene that got tacked onto the release version to explain how the heroine learned to be content with a modest lifestyle.

Red-Headed Woman (1932) is arguably the raunchiest movie Jean Harlow made at MGM (though not as raunchy as her scenes in Howard Hughes' 1930 Hell's Angels). Unlike Stanwyck in Baby Face--a proletarian heroine grimly selling herself to beat capitalism and the patriarchy at their own game--Harlow's character brazenly relishes both the sex and the posh life it wins for her. The lion's share of this sardonic comedy, scripted by Anita Loos and an uncredited F. Scott Fitzgerald, focuses on Harlow's seduction of her married boss (Chester Morris) and the havoc she wreaks in his upper-crust world. Charles Boyer has a role (his first Hollywood credit) as a French chauffeur who knows how to give satisfaction, and the film's air of breezy ribaldry even allows the star a casual flash of bare breast.

The rarest item in the collection, the 1931 Universal version of Waterloo Bridge, has long been unseen because MGM bought the film in order to do a 1940 remake (starring Vivien Leigh) and locked the original away in the vault. Directed by James Whale the same year he did Frankenstein (1931), the picture charts the romance of a chorus-girl-turned-streetwalker (Mae Clarke) and a well-born young soldier (Kent Douglass) on brief furlough from the trenches during WWI. Apart from a zesty prelude in a London music hall and two scenes on the titular bridge, the film remains yoked to its talky theatrical source, a Robert E. Sherwood play flogging the hoary conceit that no fallen woman, however pure of heart, could be permitted to marry into a good family. Unlike the Hays Code-compliant remake, the film leaves no doubt how the heroine makes her living. --Richard T. Jameson

Waterloo Bridge:On the eve of World War II a British officer revisits Waterloo Bridge and recalls the young man he was at the beginning of World War I and the young ballerina he met just before he left for the front. Myra stayed with him past curfew and is thrown out of the corps de ballet. She survives on the streets of London falling even lower after she hears her true love has been killed in action. But he wasn't killed. Those terrible years were nothing more than a bad dream is Myra's hope after Roy finds her and takes her to his family's country estate.Baby Face:Lilly (Baby Face) sleeps her way from basement speakeasy bartender literally floor by floor to the top floor of a New York office building. Bank submanager Jimmy McCoy finds her a job in the bank only to be cast aside as she hooks up with the bank's president. When he complains of not seeing her she says: "I'm working so hard I have to go to bed early every night."Red-Headed Woman:Lil works for the Legendre Company and causes Bill to divorce Irene and marry her. She has an affair with businessman Gaerste and uses him to force society to pay attention to her. She has another affair with the chauffeur Albert.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: TELEVISION/CLASSIC Rating: NR UPC: 012569679641 Manufacturer No: 67964

The Cary Grant Box Set (Holiday / Only Angels Have Wings / The Talk of the Town / His Girl Friday / The Awful Truth)

Holiday

Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant team up in this classic George Cukor comedy about love that finally finds its mark. Johnny (Grant) has just met the girl of his dreams so he proposes; she happily accepts. However he soon discovers that his lovely bride-to-be Julia (Doris Nolan) comes from a wealthy Park Avenue family with a father who likes to make all the decisions and to whom she seems incapable of defying. Her unconventional sister Linda (Hepburn) knows she wants something different from a mapped-out life; she also discovers she's falling in love with Johnny. Grant's effervescent performance is timeless and his onscreen chemistry with Hepburn electric. Based on the 1928 play by Philip Barry and the second time the story was adapted to the screen this version established the rules for intelligent romantic comedies and provided a template from which the deft Cukor could further expand.System Requirements:Run Time: 96 minsFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: NR UPC: 043396114166 Manufacturer No: 11416

This absolutely charming, wholly engaging romantic comedy is the hidden gem of the four collaborations of Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Most everyone's seen The Philadelphia Story, but few know of this unorthodox, hilarious comedy of life among the rich and privileged, though both were Broadway hits by playwright Philip Barry. Grant plays the happy-go-lucky Johnny Case, a self-made man with a dream in his heart of making just enough money to retire on and then traveling around the world. Johnny proposes to the lovely Julia (Doris Nolan) in Lake Placid, but it isn't until he comes to pay her a visit in New York that he discovers she's the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. Although his nonconformity ruffles the feathers of Julia's stuffy father, he's soon won over the whole family--most notably, Julia's rebellious sister Linda (Hepburn), who in becoming Johnny's greatest advocate finds herself irresistibly drawn to him. There's more going on here than a spiffy, surface romance, with Johnny's free-spirit determination going up against rock-hard establishment values, and director George Cukor plays up the social politics of the story just as well as the wonderful, exquisite romance. Hepburn and Grant, as always, are perfectly paired, and given able support by Lew Ayres as the black sheep of Hepburn's family, and Edward Everett Horton and Jean Dixon as Grant's longtime pals. Filmed previously in 1930; Hepburn understudied the role of Linda on Broadway and used a scene from the play in her first screen test. --Mark Englehart

This absolutely charming, wholly engaging romantic comedy is the hidden gem of the four collaborations of Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Most everyone's seen The Philadelphia Story, but few know of this unorthodox, hilarious comedy of life among the rich and privileged, though both were Broadway hits by playwright Philip Barry. Grant plays the happy-go-lucky Johnny Case, a self-made man with a dream in his heart of making just enough money to retire on and then traveling around the world. Johnny proposes to the lovely Julia (Doris Nolan) in Lake Placid, but it isn't until he comes to pay her a visit in New York that he discovers she's the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. Although his nonconformity ruffles the feathers of Julia's stuffy father, he's soon won over the whole family--most notably, Julia's rebellious sister Linda (Hepburn), who in becoming Johnny's greatest advocate finds herself irresistibly drawn to him. There's more going on here than a spiffy, surface romance, with Johnny's free-spirit determination going up against rock-hard establishment values, and director George Cukor plays up the social politics of the story just as well as the wonderful, exquisite romance. Hepburn and Grant, as always, are perfectly paired, and given able support by Lew Ayres as the black sheep of Hepburn's family, and Edward Everett Horton and Jean Dixon as Grant's longtime pals. Filmed previously in 1930; Hepburn understudied the role of Linda on Broadway and used a scene from the play in her first screen test. --Mark Englehart

Stills from Holiday (click for larger image)