It was a pre-code extravaganza this 4th of July, as my dad (who was over for a picnic) got interested in my Pre Code Hollywood: The Risqué Years DVD set, and we watched Kept Husbands and Millie back to back. I hadn’t seen them since I rented them from Netflix a few months back (which made me decide to buy them), and I’d forgotten how much I liked them, especially Millie.
After each movie, my dad would ask me, "Okay, what was wrong with that one?" Meaning, why would it not have passed the Hays Office Production Code, which began in 1934. Well, the whole idea of a "kept husband," for one. The broad hints at (and sometimes outright portrayals of) adultery. The fact that Mille dates Tommy Rock, the reporter, for four years, implying they’ve slept together (and may have lived together) without being married. In fact, Millie’s whole fall from grace, from her divorce from Jack Maitland to her murder trial at the end of the film, was too racy for a post-code Hollywood. Today, of course, it seems sweetly tame, which is why he had to ask, I suppose.
I have three Joan Crawford movies that are also pre-code: Laughing Sinners, in which she plays a night club singer who has a two year affair with a traveling salesman, before he leaves her to marry a "respectable" woman; Possessed, in which she plays Clark Gable’s mistress (he’s been hurt in the past and doesn’t want to marry; she doesn’t mind), and Rain, in which she played the prostitute Sadie Thompson. I know Joan made more movies before the code set in, but I haven’t seen any of them.
[I take that back; I have seen Grand Hotel (in which it’s implied Flaemmchen is a loose girl), and Dance, Fools, Dance, where she "tries love out on approval" and goes swimming in her lingerie. ]
Truth be told, I find these movies more interesting than some of her post-code movies I own, which include Love on the Run, Forsaking All Others, and The Women. In The Women she’s a mistress, but she clearly gets her comeuppance at the end. In Possessed, the mistress gets her man, when he gives up his chance at a political career to be with her, scandal be damned. Love on the Run is a fluffy confection containing a runaway bride and a reporter who in the end can’t bring himself to go on lying and taking advantage of her (no, not that way, but by using her story to sell papers). Laughing Sinners, by contrast, has Ivy repent at the end by sticking with the Salvation Army, but in between she works in a nightclub, has an affair with Howard Palmer, and later spends the night with him when, now as a Salvation Army girl, she sees him again for the first time after being dumped by him.
None of it is completely true to life, of course, being Hollywood, but the pre-code movies are a lot closer. Which is what makes them interesting, and also what started the Catholic League of Decency on the code in the first place.
But I started out talking about Kept Husbands and Millie. Thought I’d forgotten, didn’t you? I like Millie better, because the "one woman’s story" angle is more appealing to me than watching Joel McCrea slowly struggle (then fail, but later succeed) to not become a "kept husband." He’s kind of a weenie at first, letting Dot order him around and taking a cushy job (which mostly entails learning how to play bridge) at his father-in-law’s construction firm. It obviously bothers him, but not enough to do anything about it until near the end of the film. He takes the St. Louis job, Dot comes to her senses and promises from then on to live on his salary and keep him with love, not her family’s money. On a side note, the actress who plays his mother, Mary Carr, was just adorable. (I like her even more since I just discovered she was born in Philadelphia and lived to be 99, bless her heart.)
Mille, as I said, was my favorite of the two. Her downfall comes in subtle and realistic steps, occurring gradually over the course of the movie. If you looked only at the beginning and then the end, you’d wonder how she could have fallen so far. The rest of the movie shows you. She marries young and has a child; a few years later, she discovers her husband is cheating on her and divorces him, leaving baby Connie with her father so the child can have the wealthy life he can provide.
Millie’s not down and out yet, though. She gets a job selling cigarettes in a hotel concession stand and seems content with her simpler life. She starts dating Tommy Rock, local boy reporter, but tells him marriage isn’t for her. After four years together (during which Millie starts her own concession business) she finds out he’s cheating on her. Now the slide down picks up speed, as Millie’s drinking increases; a title card tells us eight years go by, and "Millie’s still the red-headed girl...but no one cares anymore." I’ve spoiled most of the plot points, I see, so I’ll just sum up the ending by saying there’s a murder trial, and Millie’s long estranged daughter makes an appearance.
It’s a sad story, all the more touching because it’s believable. At least, I feel it is, for the times in which it was made. Not having lived in those times, obviously, I can’t completely vouch for its authenticity, and of course I’m viewing the movies through the "lens" of my time and experiences. Still, I think people then, and probably even now, can relate to Millie’s story, and understand her pain, and the choices she makes. It’s a genuine human story...why did there need to be a code against things like that?
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