UNDER EIGHTEEN (1931)

Don’t be fooled by the bait-and-switch title, provocative even by the standards of Pre-Code Warner Bros.  Little under-age naughtiness, though leading lady Marian Marsh, who’d soon slip off the radar, was indeed eighteen in 1931.  Instead, a NYC tenement drama, close on the heels of King Vidor’s superior adaptation of Elmer Rice’s Pulitzer Prize winning STREET SCENE out a few months earlier, the likely reason for a naturalistic tone from director Archie Mayo in the first two acts, before he gives way to showmanship and a triple-whammy Happy Days Are Here Again finale.  Marsh, kid sister of unhappily married Anita Page, brought low by the Depression and just getting by as a fashion house seamstress, cancels wedding plans to butter-and-egg man Regis Toomey* after seeing Page’s unemployed husband (Norman Foster) knock her around.  Hoping to raise cash to cover Page’s divorce costs, Marsh heads to the penthouse aerie of the ladykiller/B’way producer she met at work, Warren William.  But before she ‘gives in’ to him, once-and-future fiancé Toomey shows up for a show down.  The melodramatic last act is Ladies’ Magazine fluff of the period, sticking out all the more so next to the trenchant down-at-the-heels realism of what’s come before.  Cinematographer Barney McGill’s use of low-angle establishing shots lends low-rent chic to some scenes, but the raw economics of a family’s collapse is always apparent.  Never more so than in a fascinating bit of dialog covering the cost of finding a divorce lawyer for sister Page after Foster gives her a black eye.  Speaking almost in code to avoid saying the word ‘divorce,’ you’d think the subject was the even more verboten issue of abortion.  (Or was that the original intention?)  On the whole, the film not really good enough, but still quite watchable.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *The phrase Butter-and-Egg-Man, as in a solid, dependable, slightly boring marriage prospect, was popularized in the 1925 George S. Kaufman play of that name.  Here, Regis Toomey’s butter-and-egg-man actually IS a butter-and-egg-man, driving a grocery delivery truck for a living.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: As mentioned above, STREET SCENE/’31.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/05/street-scene-1931.html