The Nones of Ann Harding: Her Private Affair

Note: Mary Astor said nice things about Ann Harding in her autobiography, calling her a “vital woman” and a “fighter.” Joan Crawford said “I cherish Ann's companionship more than any other person I have ever known," raving about Ann's "radiance," "beautiful soul", and "lack of pretense." Barbara Stanwyck said in 1934, “I have always hoped that my own work showed the same degree of sincerity.”

Her Private Affair
1929 / 1:15
Tagline: “Her guilt will either destroy her or set her free”
[internet archive]

This early talkie opens with Ann Harding’s restless hands and her melancholy distressed look as she talks on the phone. Got me hypnotized?

Totally. Tell me anything. I can believe anything Ann Harding for an hour and change.

Vera is on the telephone with a former love interest Arnold (Lawford Davidson). Arnold is a womanizer that wants money from Vera for a bundle of indiscreet letters. Tonight. Vera goes to her husband (Harry Bannister) for the money but doesn’t tell him why she wants it. He can’t come up with it at such short notice so Vera decides to see Arnold in person to tell him he’s going to have to wait until the next day. When Vera skips out of Carmen between acts and finally meets Arnold, a terrible accident happens, proving once again that just keeping a handgun in the house is bad medicine.

Ann Harding plays a decent person who is so refined that she is too good but the unhelpful guilt over the terrible accident puts her under strain. Not telling her husband, not coming clean, and not clearing up the legalities from the get-go put her under more strain. With no music in this early talkie, Ann Harding conveys with her voice Vera’s marital, ethical and legal anguish and the subsequent changes, good and bad, to her character and behavior. Life being the funny, funny riddle it is, after the terrible accident, she becomes a kinder, more humane person.

Harding’s voice - trained for the stage - was an attraction to an industry that suddenly needed gorgeous actresses that could deliver a line properly. Harding’s precise diction is a tad old-fashioned and theatrical in our 2026. Good actresses salvage iffy lines and so she persuasively manages histrionic lines like “I can't make you happy. I must go away. I must leave you.” She’s faltering and afraid but not making a scene. Her voice gets across Vera’s unquiet heart and sheer bewilderment this whole incident has happened to her, who’s never done anybody any harm ever. At the New Year’s Eve party, perfect is her voice with its quaver of agitation, haunted by guilt.

For me, a beguiled movie-goer with enthralled tolerance for Ann Harding’s thespian decisions, Harding seldom overacts in this picture. And when she does overdo it, it’s not showing off. Ann Harding is never false. Your milage of course will vary. The call depends on the degree to which a movie-goer is hypnotized by Ann Harding. For me, the answer is “Totally.” I can do anything Ann Harding for an hour and change.

This movie was based on a Broadway play that flopped. Nevertheless, Hollywood was hoovering up talky dramas with sophisticated people in ritzy surroundings. This movie was shot in a stagey, staid way so actors could stay close to microphones. I thought the courtroom scene and the New Year’s Eve Party were shot with some vague sense that they were making a movie, and so was the opening shot, which features only Harding’s hands. But the intention of giving The Folks the illusion this is how the people who go see Carmen live and love is more important here than cinematic values.

This movie, Harding’s second film, was a success with the audiences and served as a foundation of her stardom. Maybe in the early talkie days, one strong performance in a picture was enough to satisfy audiences. Battling guilt and social pressures resonated with audiences – even conformists are subject to spells of the guilts sometimes and have their skirmishes with The Combine.

People could also relate to the situation in which the husband works too much, which undermines the stability of their marriage by making the wife feel disregarded. People could also relate to married people sticking together for better or worse. Folks back then probably nodded their heads when Vera tells her husband, “I like the feeling of belonging to you.” Nowadays some people would be uncomfortable with “Belonging to you is a feeling I like;” it’s just not the way some people would say they like the feeling of comfort, safety, and being valued by the other person. Expressions change, feelings don’t.

Perry Mason 158: TCOT Demure Defendant

Note: From 1956 in the 50^th Perry Mason novel receptionist Gertie finally gets described in Chapter Seven. She looks like Connie Cezon! Stand-in for Bette Davis! Meanwhile, the big clue shows up fashionably late, so readers have zero chance of beating Mason to the punch. He barely gets it himself before springing the solution like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

The Case of the Demure Defendant – Erle Stanley Gardner

Nadine Farr is beautiful, but beauty doesn’t stop the nightmares. The dread. The guilt that coils in her gut like a live wire. For professional help, she goes to Dr. Logbert Denair - a name that sounds like it belongs in the year I was born. He prescribes talk therapy under sodium pentothal. Truth serum. Nadine talks. Too much. She says she poisoned her uncle. She says she tossed the cyanide bottle into a lake. Denair records every word on reel-to-reel tape.

Now he’s sitting on a confession that could ruin lives. He doesn’t want to hand it to the cops. He doesn’t want to bury it either. So he calls Perry Mason. Mason listens, calm as a surgeon. He tells Denair patient statements are privileged - but evidence of a crime? That’s another story. Mason warns him: truth serum can twist reality. Delusion isn’t admissible. Before anyone runs to the police, someone needs to dig deeper. Denair hires Mason to do the digging.

From there, the ground shifts. This 1956 case is a maze of secrets and sharp turns. Mason ends up accused of fabricating evidence - Hamilton Burger grinning like a wolf while he says it. Mason gives advice to hapless fools unwary enough to consider selective spilling:

Get this straight. You’re dealing with a murder case. No matter how awkward the truth is, you can’t fabricate a situation that will meet all of the requirements. You can’t get a falsehood that will dovetail with all of the facts. Sooner or later all of the other facts will be known. If your story doesn’t dovetail you’ll have to change it. If you change it under pressure the truth will then be ten times more awkward.

For a few chapters, it looks bad. Real bad. Gardner pushes Mason to the edge before pulling him back in the final pages.

TCOT Demure Defendant isn’t cozy. It’s clinical, almost surgical, in how it dissects fear and guilt. Gardner plays with the ethics of psychiatry, the fragility of memory, and the law’s hunger for certainty.

Fans of Perry, Della, and Paul will love the ride. New readers? Maybe not. Gardner’s tricks with evidence can feel glib and pat, like sleight of hand. But if you want a Mason novel that flirts with psychological suspense, this one delivers.

The Kalends of Ann Harding: Paris Bound

Note: This 1929 movie asks the question whether married couples can have a relationship with other people outside the marriage but remain committed to the marriage. Apparently in our culture every generation for the last century has to hash this issue out, given we still see on Reddit stories like “I proposed an open marriage, but I regret it.” Maybe antique movies with enduring themes will still have relevance for us post-moderns: literature is news that stays news, said Ezra Pound.

Paris Bound
1929 / 1:16
Tagline: “Is Love Crushed by Marriage?”
[internet archive]

This is the film version of the 1927 play by Philip Barry. He was known for exploring the intersectionality of love, marriage, and sex among the young, healthy, and wealthy. This seems to be one of Barry’s lesser-known plays and Hollywood never re-made this film version like they re-made Holiday, The Animal Kingdom, and The Philadelphia Story.

The wedding ceremony of Mary (Ann Harding) and James (Fredric March) seems to be an event that no one wants to attend. The guests look dubious, as if they were wishing they were someplace else. James’ former GF Noel is so obviously repining that the other guests tell Jim to give her a talking to, to snap her out of her decline. Jim is always restrained with her but Noel tells Jim that she is his heart and soul. Theatrical Noel also tells Mary that Mary has the wisest eyes Noel has ever seen.

As I said, the guests look stricken, like they were digesting a frightening diagnosis. This is strange because in the opening scene, her first scene ever in a motion picture, in a wedding dress, Ann Harding looks stunning. Breath-taking. The headpiece and veil make her look like she has descended from the Empyrean to show us funny-looking mortals something … wonderful. After almost one hundred years, in a brutalized monochrome print Ann Harding’s oval face radiates timeless elegance, with luminous eyes, refined features, and a serene expression. Her classic beauty blends intelligence, warmth, grace, and quiet strength, leaving a memorable impression today. The only other entrance that made me gape and gabble like this was that shot of Grace Kelly alighting from a cloud before broken-legged Stewart in her first scene in Rear Window.

Anyway, enough babbling. Jim and Mary promise never to quit each other though they grant “sex attraction” for third parties will happen. This kind of open-mindedness is often expressed by Barry’s characters until the fat is in the fire and characters conclude keeping more traditional attitudes leads to less mess in personal relations. Barry’s claims, I think, are that monogamy means fewer hurt feelings and thus in the long run exclusivity is more conducive to peace of mind.

To continue, they have a child and Mary plays her piano looking soulful and thoughtful (and few actresses do sad and pensive better than Ann Harding). Every now and then Jim has to take the big boat to Europe for six weeks at a time. He works for a publisher who has a stable of expatriate American writers so he needs to visit the Riviera to confer with them.

Mary is decidedly not a soldier about these lengthy separations but stays home for the sake of their toddler son. Thunderheads appear when Mary gets inadvertent word from Jim’s sister that circumstantial evidence suggests Jim and Noel met on the Rivera for discreet adult play. Mary wretchedly works with composer Richard Parrish on their ballet. Without conviction, she lamely argues that married people need vacations from each other once in a while. Richard however falls in love with Mary and declares his love for Mary. Poor Mary - when it rains, it pours.

This is an early talkie, so the sound in the IA print sounds muddy in places, has drop-outs and random noise, and an annoying echo of various words and phrases. Also the staging is static, not cinematic at all. The acting is sometimes histrionic – emphatic, earnest, with diction to ensure that theatre-goers in the back rows will catch every word. I think Fredric March and Ann Harding, both stage-trained, are natural in this early all-talking movie - they both know how to deliver a line.

European Reading Challenge #7

 I read this for the European Reading Challenge 2026.

The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia - Orlando Figes

This monumental study of Stalin’s Russia is more than a chronicle of the Soviet era; it is a social history of the entire twentieth century in Russia. Orlando Figes reconstructs decades of deprivation, hunger, fear, and state terror through archival documents and the voices of ordinary people. His narrative captures how politics and economics penetrated private life, shaping families and identities under relentless pressure.

The book’s title refers to those who learned to “whisper” in order to survive - a metaphor for lives lived in secrecy and fear. Figes animates these lives with vivid detail, showing how repression seeped into kitchens, bedrooms, and even thoughts. Communal apartments, for example, were not merely a solution to housing shortages but instruments of surveillance. In shared kitchens, “even the tea kettles have ears.” A careless joke could lead to denunciation, interrogation, torture, and exile to the Gulag - or worse. Under such conditions, silence became a survival strategy, and public declarations of loyalty masked private despair.

My own understanding of these stories is sharpened by time spent in Riga in the early 1990s, where I met survivors of deportation and exile. They spoke of friends thrown from trains into the Siberian wilderness; of years spent forgetting their native tongue; of relatives killed in ways too brutal to repeat. These encounters echo Figes’s portraits of resilience and resignation.

One of the book’s most unsettling themes is complicity. Terror made nearly every citizen feel like both victim and accomplice. Denunciation could eliminate a rival or secure a coveted apartment. Ideological zeal - fueled by class hatred and fear - turned neighbors into informants. Yet, paradoxically, many victims continued to venerate Stalin, writing poems of devotion even after losing loved ones to his bloody regime. Figes probes this contradiction but admits its mystery: why do people cling to the author of their suffering? One survivor offers a grim rationale: “We would have fought the same way anyway… because it’s easier to tolerate violence from our own people than from foreigners.”

The book’s first half - covering collectivization, the liquidation of kulaks, and the Great Terror - feels deeper and more cohesive than the postwar chapters. Still, Figes’s attempt to frame the war as a dividing line is compelling. Postwar society, he argues, remembered not the suffering but the unity forged against Hitler, even as repression persisted in subtler forms.

The final chapters examine reactions to Stalin’s death: hope tempered by dread, as no one knew what would follow. Survivors had adapted to fear so thoroughly that its absence was disorienting. This is perhaps the book’s most chilling insight - that human beings can grow accustomed to any cruelty. State terror, given time, becomes ordinary.

The Whisperers is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand Russian society and the psychology of survival under totalitarianism. Its absence in Russian translation - and Figes’s status as an “un-person” there - speaks volumes about its power. Like his earlier Natasha’s Dance, this work combines scholarly rigor with narrative grace, but here the tone is darker, the questions more haunting. How does a society endure decades of violence and still whisper words of love to its oppressor? Figes does not offer easy answers.

Perry Mason 157: Cool & Lam and Connoisseurs

Note: As a child of the Sixties, I’ve always believed that what’s neglected or off the beaten path is cool. If something becomes wildly popular, I suspect it must have lost some of its edge - though I admit there are exceptions, like The Name of the Rose, a work of philosophy that somehow managed to be a best-selling novel.

Cool & Lam and Us Connoisseurs

Erle Stanley Gardner’s Cool and Lam books? They’re the B-side of his career, the deep cut we hardcore readers brag about knowing while everyone else hums the Perry Mason theme. Mason was Gardner’s platinum-selling run of singles: courtroom pyrotechnics, nice clothes, and a TV franchise that ran longer than many marriages. Radio, comic strips, articles in TV Guide - Mason was the brand, the icon, the guy who made courtroom pyrotechnics look like a well-tailored suit. America ate it up because America loves a hero who wins on logic and showbiz and never sweats saving the innocent from The Combine.

Cool and Lam? Forget it. No TV blitz, no radio soap, no Hollywood movies however bad. Just two oddballs in print: Bertha Cool, a bulldozer dripping in diamonds, and Donald Lam, a bantamweight disbarred lawyer who solves cases by seeing the legalities sideways. Try dumping that into mid-century American living rooms on Sunday night versus Bonanza. In the late Fifties and early Sixties America wanted its morality without nuance and its courtroom drama reassuring. Cool and Lam were built for laughs, for folks who grokked Catch-22 and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Cool and Lam lived where ethics fray and human folly struts buck naked. That’s not prime-time material; that’s cult territory.

Branding killed them, too. Mason was marketed as the lawyer-detective supreme, a beacon of brilliance and virtue. Cool and Lam? They were the cool older cousins who unexpectedly show up at the family Christmas party and show signs of having an anarchic sense of humor fueled by psychedelics. Publishers and studios pumped Mason like he was the cure for polio, leaving Cool and Lam to hustle on their own dime. Result: Mason becomes a household deity; Cool and Lam roam the shadows.

And yet - here’s the kicker - the cognoscenti know better. We dig Cool and Lam because they punk the hard-boiled formula. Lam’s wiry intellect jousts with Cool’s blunt-force pragmatism. These books don’t have a narrative arc like Mason novels; they riff on ambiguity, nothing stays still for long. Writer Scott Bradfield brilliantly nails it:

Mason bends the law (within limits that the law allows), but he doesn’t break it. Cool and Lam, on the other hand, treat the law with almost brutal disregard: they lie to the cops and their clients and disturb crime scenes by removing (sometimes destroying) significant evidence and planting fake evidence and alibis. They seem to assume that the law  -  like the many grifters and con games they encounter, from salted gold mines to rigged slot machines, automobile insurance fraudsters, and insider trading - is just a game. And that whatever laws they don’t break were probably broken to begin with.

Families implode, business ethics wobble, and Gardner implies "A free mind, my friend, doesn’t get tangled up in nonsense not in its power. Be the Lam: see clearly, act kindly, and don’t let prejudice or anger drive the bus. Pack four virtues in your pocket and don a calm expression that says, ‘I’ve seen worse.’" If Mason is unpredictable but trustworthy Brubeck, Cool and Lam are bebop - fast, crooked, and sly while being kinda dumb. 

Bottom line: if you crave complexity, irony, and a worldview that doesn’t come shrink-wrapped in excellence, Cool and Lam are your jam. Mason may own the marquee, but Cool and Lam own the underground. And that’s where the real music plays, for we happy few anyway.

Perry Mason 156: TCOT Postponed Murder

Note: The manuscripts for two full-length Perry Mason novels were discovered in Erle Stanley Gardner's papers after his death in 1970:  The Case of the Fenced-In Woman and the story reviewed below. It’s hard to date when he wrote this, since Gardner carefully avoided topical references, but he does mention a yacht auto-pilot system which was probably available to the filthy rich after WWII, in the 1950s.

Perryisms to Live by: When I start unraveling a mystery, I can’t seem to find a brake. Every time I put my foot down, it hits the throttle.

The Case of the Postponed Murder – Erle Stanley Gardner

Mae Farr walks into Perry Mason’s office with a story as thin as a dime. She says she’s her sister, a candy-shop girl in a Northern California burg. Mason knows she’s fibbing. But she’s in a jam, and Mason likes jams - especially when they come with good eggs who’ve made bad choices. Her plea? Stop Penn Wentworth, a wealthy playboy with a yacht and a hobby of stalking “her sister” (herself).

Paul Drake, Mason’s gumshoe, digs up the dirt: Mae’s wanted for forging a fat check. The check bore Penn’s signature. Penn, a bookie with champagne tastes, throws parties on his yacht. Did Mae forge his name - or did someone forge hers? Mason files that under “Things to Ponder.”

Penn barges in, full of indignation and cologne, claiming Mae forged his name. Enter Harold Anders, a rancher with muck on his boots and love in his heart, ready to shake Penn’s tree for pestering Mae.

Soon Mason is summoned to Della Street’s apartment, where Mae and Harold are holed up. Mae spins a yarn: aboard Penn’s yacht, she fought off his advances when - blam! - Penn was shot through the skylight. Harold, conveniently on the dock with a gun, slipped and took a swim. Mason ferries Mae back to the yacht, only to find it missing.

Harold tossed his gun near a hot-dog stand in the rain. Mason and Della hunt for it, fail. The police hunt for it, fail harder. Meanwhile, the yacht resurfaces, cruising on auto-pilot. Penn, once in his underwear, now fully dressed and very dead, sports a bullet hole and a fatal case of inter-cranial bleeding. How did he get there? Add his soon-to-be ex-wife Juanita -temperamental as a teapot - and her rich beau Sid Eversel, a pilot with a camera and a country mansion. Stir well.

The legal fireworks? A preliminary hearing before Justice Scanlon, a Justice of the Peace who never finished high school and thinks “due process” is a plumbing term. He hates long cross-examinations and technical twaddle. The case doesn’t hit a courtroom until the last ten pages, where Scanlon steals the show with his homespun rulings. Watching Mason steer him without Scanlon noticing is like watching a cat teach a dog to climb trees. Scanlon may be the most colorful judge Gardner ever minted.

Now, about Gardner: his descriptions are perfunctory, his character sketches thinner than a weasel. Nearly every word outside quotation marks could vanish without harm. Editing? It’s unknown if Gardner did his usual final checking and polishing on this late manuscript. But I doubt it. “Swell” pops up like dandelions and so does the antique Americanism “It suits me down to the ground.” Chapter breaks are as awkward as a drunk at a wedding: 40-page Chapter 11 and Chapter 12 with its weird break should’ve been sliced into four chapters. And strong-minded Mae’s sudden lifestyle switch at the end? Explained by the traditional notion that women are prone to change their minds for purely emotional reasons. Quaint, if you like your gender stereotypes smelling of trunks stored under basement steps.

Yet - yet! – Gardner’s novels race like a greyhound at Derby Lane: breakneck plots, courtroom pyrotechnics, two women that want to do it their way, dialogue that jabs and feints like prizefighters. Gardner’s magic lies not in polish but in pace. And that, dear reader, is swell.

Perry Mason 155: You Can Die Laughing

Note: We fans read Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason novels for his intricate plots and his magic at moving a story along. In contrast, we read the Cool and Lam novels for the energetic and engaging characters of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. This outing, the 17^th in a body of work that can be read in any order, was released in 1957.

You Can Die Laughing – Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A. A. Fair

The PI team of Cool & Lam do their tango in this not quite hard-boiled kaleidoscope of L.A. Though the city does not quite become a character like Ross Macdonald’s Southern California, happily, all the usual elements are shoved back onstage wearing a louder neckties and sillier shoes: redheads that glow like neon beer signs, clients with the moral steadiness of politicians, property beefs, and the old standby, fear of scandal. But in this one, which feels more tightly packed than usual, the story is not so convoluted and the pace seems faster.

The book kicks off with Texan Lawton C. Corning: a raw‑boned pomade‑scented mogul with manure boots, latent motives, and a story that shifts faster than jukebox 45’s. He wants a woman found. Definitely no oil leases involved - pay no attention to that desolate parcel I want to buy. Lam buys none of it but takes the case anyway because the Cool & Lam business model is 1) get lied to, 2) get confused, 3) get in dutch with the cops, 4) get to the bottom of things, 5) get paid.

They find the woman before you can say “wait, what,” and she’s a comic‑strip bombshell straight from a teenage boy’s dingy backroom of a subconscious: red hair, blue eyes, a figure like Daisy Mae in Dogpatch. She speaks exclusively in Babe-speak. Suddenly her husband wants to sue Cool & Lam for defamation, the nosy neighbor forgets everything she claimed, and Lam smells something rotten.

Bertha Cool, owner-operator of a PI agency is not a feminist by ideology, politics, or inclination. She's not advocating equality and she’s certainly not mentoring other women. She’s too busy bulldozing through everyone - men, women, clients, cops, and her partner poor Donald Lam.

Bertha's temper visibly began to rise. "There are times when I could take this paper knife and cut your throat from ear to ear, Donald Lam! What the hell do you mean you rented her?"

One‑hundred‑sixty‑five pounds of managerial black hole, attracting trouble of all kinds inexorably toward her office. She’s insulted professionally and cosmically when clients assume B. Cool is a man, and she gets back by being tougher than any three Texan lunkheads. Meanwhile little Donald Lam, bantam sleuth and disbarred lawyer, skates on the edge of legality like a kid doing figure‑eights on late March ice. A real “brainy little bastard” - Bertha’s words - who irritates her into doing the right thing.

Granted this outing feels a little lightweight and more straightforward than we like, almost like an extended short story, but it is well worth reading for the interplay not only between Bertha and Donald but Donald and persons of interest.