She was a Good Girl in a Bad Joint!

Sensation Hunters
1933 / 73 minutes
Tagline: “THERE WERE PITFALLS AT EVERY STEP ---AND SHE DIDN'T MISS A SINGLE STEP!”
[internet archive]

The “Pre-Code” Era was roughly 1931 to 1934, when American movies were at their most spicy, a time when illicit sex and violence were common themes. The Poverty Row studio Monogram flirted with the exploitation genre. And this odd antique was the result.

It’s not nearly as disposable as silly things like Reefer Madness. It has genuine actors and actresses. The writers worked in character development and a moral with a little heft to placate puritans like me. In his debut, the director Charles Vidor added artistic touches. Vidor was not a hack and went on to have a respectable career. Hey, he was Hungarian so he must have been cool (my grandmother was Hungarian).

The opening sequence, set on a cruise ship from San Francisco to Panama City, features one woman in hot-pants and another in a bathing suit. A middle-aged man with a fake English milord accent and, worse, a travesty of a country shooting outfit tosses a coin on the floor so he can have a cover story if he is busted looking through keyholes. To fulfill the educational purpose of this production, we get a camera shot through a keyhole to see women changing, in case we weren’t quite sure what he was doing.

Due to the pandering content and the poor quality of the print (like sound drop-outs due to lost frames), I, my mother’s uptight son, was tempted to give up about 15 minutes into it. But the characterization got me more interested in the story and less bothered by the blemishes.

Upper-middle-class woman (Marion Burns) for reasons that are not made clear, signs up as singer in a troupe of dancers and b-girls. The troupe works in a notorious cabaret called The Bull Ring in wild, wide-open Panama City. Her working-class roommate, perennial best friend Arline Judge, is puzzled why such an elegant woman as Marion, brought up in affluent circumstances would take up such a job.

The Mama is played by a silent screen heroine Juanita Hansen, a Mack Sennet protege. Not above smacking the girls around to enforce her expectations, she is crude and bossy and all too effective in this role. The male actors, as usual, are nothing to write home about, but Walter Brennan has a small part in which he stutters in that injured voice he was saddled with after he was gassed during World War I. It was an era in which communicative disorders were played for laughs.

The action moves along briskly, but the real attraction is the setting of the down-at-heels cabaret, the third-rate hotel rooms, and people one does not meet in the normal course of life. Warner Bros had the rep for gritty settings but clearly the Poverty Row studios could render reality in all its romping glory to make us think, “My place is home with mother, but that sure does look fun.”

I’m a Thirties buff so I like anything that gives me a sense of what the time looked and smelled like. I’m also a moralist so I was placated that this movie, while not what I would call prim, was not as saucy as I was fearing. Unless I was reading into (I'm a meaning-seeking animal), I got the message to be careful what kind of people, places, and conditions you settle for since we set bars lower and lower insensibly until one fine day we wake up and realize we’re hanging out with the likes of people Mother wouldn’t have had in the house, I’m sure.

The Kalends of Perry Mason 73

Notes: In the ancient Roman calendar, the Kalends, Nones, and Ides were three special days that marked the beginning, middle, and end of a month's counting period. In hat tip to those Stoic Romans in late antiquity, on the first, fifth or seventh, and the fifteen of every month, we will run an article about Erle Stanley Gardner's various contributions to the mystery genre. Running pieces more often because many articles are in the can and it's not like I'm exempt from the universal experience of humankind.

The Case of the Black-eyed Blonde – Erle Stanley Gardner

“The lawyer is like a doctor,” says criminal lawyer Perry Mason to Della Street to open this 1944 mystery, “only for justice.”

Perry Mason sees a parade of iffy clients in his office - but Diana Regis is probably one of the iffiest. She arrives in Mason’s office clad only in a fur coat and a dressing gown, besides the shiner of the title. It turns out that she had been pressured into a date with her employer’s stepson. Not playing the game "put out or walk home" when she refused the stepson’s advances, in the tradition of many players at the time, he tossed her out of the car, forcing her to hike home. Meeting again at the house (she’d been living with her employer’s family), he smacked her when she called him out. On top of this abuse, he colluded with his mother to accuse Diana of theft.

Seeing herself in a vulnerable position, she hoofs it over to the office of Perry Mason. The casual brutality bothers Perry and Della. In court, Perry’s deft questioning shows the stepson to be a lieclops. Everything is quickly resolved – the alleged theft can be explained. Diana Regis receives handsome compensation.

And when - seemingly – the door can be shut on a nasty incident, the plot gets thicker. And poor Diana ends up in in the dock.

This is a good detective story. The twists are intricate, the action doesn’t let you to break away for dinner, and the dueling between the operators of the criminal justice mincing machine and Perry, Della Street and PI Paul Drake is played for high stakes.