GENTLEMAN'S FATE (1931)

Legend has it that M-G-M all but dumped pricey silent-film star John Gilbert after his first two Talkies tanked. Maybe. Yet they certainly seem to be trying to revive their waning romantic idol here. (Alas in another misbegotten vehicle.) Why else borrow hot young helmer Mervyn LeRoy, fresh off LITTLE CAESAR/’30, and starting his best period with FIVE STAR FINAL and I AM A FUGITIVE FROM A CHAIN GANG over the next year. Why else bother with a showcase vehicle for Gilbert, offering three distinct personalities for him to try on: Act One: rich, parentless society playboy, afinacéd to wealthy beauty; Act Two: reluctant bootlegger with a family he never knew he had in dying Old World Italian father and unlikely brother (pug-ugly Louis Wolheim); Act Three: hard-driving mob man, getting out of the biz to marry a good-hearted moll. Pretty hard to swallow melodrama (with missing story beats and not enough action), but the real problem is that it never gets a move on. A far cry from the energy LeRoy* would have given this at the time at home studio Warners. Only Wolheim shows spark, his noseless concave face like a matching jigsaw puzzle piece to Gilbert’s convex profile with generous snoot. And Gilbert's acting? He's fine, if a bit lost, only really connecting in a brief heart-to-heart with Wolheim after a 10-day stint in prison. Looking a tad disheveled, his hair less than perfectly groomed, he comes across in a more modern fashion . . . if only for a moment.  Someone to hold in reserve if Ronald Colman weren’t available.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *LeRoy, in TAKE ONE, his under-researched auto-bio, claims this as Gilbert’s only Talkie box-office success. Not so, though it did have an encouraging preview . . . then died. But Gilbert was hardly the only fast fader in here: Wolheim died the next year; while comic relief moll Marie Prevost, serious love interest moll Anita Page and shallow society fiancée Leila Hyams were all pretty much out of the biz by the mid-‘30s. Gilbert’s career collapse not the exception, but the rule.