UP FOR MURDER (1931)

Reliable silent film director Monta Bell never found his footing in the Talkies, yet seems on the right path remaking his M-G-M silent MAN, WOMAN AND SIN/’27 over at Universal.  Staying unusually close to his original script (by ‘31 most of the synch-sound technical kinks worked out), the simple, effective story remains: naive ‘cub’ reporter falls hard for mature, sophisticated Society Columnist unaware she’s the ‘kept’ woman of his newspaper publisher.  Defending her ‘honor’ when the publisher returns a day early to the swanky apartment he pays for her to live in, a fight breaks out and the publisher is killed in the tussle.  Horrified, Ms. Mistress and the newspaper’s lawyer cook up a story to hush things up, but the kid’s too honest to do anything but confess.  The silent version, miraculously restored after a century's silence and two decades of legal issues, starring legendary/doomed stage actress Jeanne Eagles (now we can see two of her three features*), has three serious advantages over this remake.  Eagles, of course, her corrupt beauty and knowing demeanor, completely three-dimensional where Genevieve Tobin no more than pleasant company.  More important, the silent has a prologue on the cub reporter’s tenement youth in a largely Black D.C. neighborhood, a rare event in a 1927 feature film.  The silent also does without the sound film's tacked on sentimental finish.  In fact, the best shot in MAN, WOMAN AND SIN is its last; an extreme close-up of Eagles thru a small oval backseat window as she drives out of the young man’s life forever.  A stunner.  Elsewhere, Bell is able to precisely copy far more of the silent film than you might expect (even the inter-titles show up as dialogue), and has perfectly cast 22-yr-old Lew Ayres (riding high after ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT/’30*) as virgin journalist blindly in love.  In the silent, 30-yr-old John Gilbert looks far too knowing.  And shaving his mustache to look a bit younger just unbalances his face.  (Not such a big nose, just looks that way.)

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Hopefully, Bell’s silent original will soon appear in some rentable form.  Till then, you can see what all the fuss was about by watching Jeanne Eagles in an Early Talkie version of Somerset Maugham’s THE LETTER/’29, made just months before her death by overdose.   Avoid the Kim Novak bio-pic from 1957.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/02/jeanne-eagles-1957.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK: To their credit, Universal knew they had a new marque-worthy movie star in Lew Ayres, they just didn’t know what to do with him.  See what might have been in this little known, but rockin’ Warner Bros. loan-out, THE DOORWAY TO HELL/’30.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/11/hard-to-mourn-mostly-lost-early-talkies.html