Charles and I ended the evening watching a really bizarre movie I’d just ordered from the Turner Classic Movies Web site: The Idle Rich, a 1929 weirdie from MGM directed by William C. DeMille (Cecil B. DeMille’s older brother — Cecil had got involved in the movie business because he wanted to do something that would match brother William’s success as a Broadway stage director; once Cecil became a hugely successful film director, William came out to Hollywood and managed to win a reputation and some success, mostly for drawing-room comedies rather than the audacious sex movies and period spectacles with which Cecil was identified) from a script which began life as a story by E. F. Stearns that was adapted into a 1925 play by Edith Ellis called White Collars, one of the first literary works to use that term as a metaphor for what’s called in the film’s dialogue the “Great Middle Class,” people who functioned in offices and assisted the managers of the economy instead of actually being on construction sites or shop floors making things. The film begins in the office of multimillionaire William Van Luyn (Conrad Nagel, top-billed — this was during that era in which Nagel was getting so many roles on the strength of having established that he had a recordable voice that he complained he and his wife could no longer go to the movies for their own entertainment since they couldn’t find a movie to see that he wasn’t in), who makes a rather crude grab for his secretary, Joan Thayer (Leila Hyams) — she’s on the floor looking for something and he grips her arm, then pulls her up and passionately kisses her. In a movie made today, a scene like that would be the start of a huge lawsuit against him for sexual harassment, but in 1929 what that led to was mutual passion and ultimately a marriage proposal.
What makes this film — scripted by
Clara Beranger, whose most famous credit was the 1920 Paramount adaptation of
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with John Barrymore — interesting is that instead of
following the clichéd path of having Van Luyn’s snooty upper-class relatives
look down their noses at his white-collar bride (indeed, we get the impression
from this film that William is the only Van Luyn left!), it follows the not-quite-so-clichéd path of having
the other Thayers look down their noses at the snot-nosed rich kid who’s just
married into their clan. William
moves into their apartment (a fascinating set whose furnishings and accessories
indicate what people who weren’t rich themselves but had just as bad taste as
the rich of their day did for décor: they bought hideous couches, chairs,
dishes and the like and tried to be as “stylish” as their budgets could afford), refuses to sleep in his wife’s bed and
curls up on one of those hideously ugly (as well as way too small for him) couches, and when he’s not at the
office lets himself get lectured by the other Thayers: the parents (James Neill
and Edythe Chapman), Joan’s sister Helen (Bessie Love, who out-acts the two
leads), their brother Frank (Kenneth Gibson) and their nephew Henry (Robert
Ober), who makes vaguely radical political pronouncements and seems to be the
only one of the Thayers without a job. (The script is sloppy enough that it’s
only about two-thirds into the film that we realize Henry is a nephew and not
another Thayer sibling.)
The movie rather drones on from there, perched
uneasily between comedy and drama and not working all that well as either, and
one misses either the sort of all-out comedic approach Chaplin or Keaton would
have brought to a story like this or the genuine sentiment Frank Capra could
have supplied if he’d been
directing this. Then the third act begins — the film is divided by intertitles
and it’s clear they fall where the original intermission curtains of the play
did — and Van Luyn announces that Henry has talked him into giving away his
entire fortune and living the rest of his life as a member of the Great Middle
Class himself. Just then Thayer père
announces that he’s been fired because his employer wants to bring in a younger
man. Along the way Van Luyn is accosted by Helen’s boyfriend, truckdriver Tom
Gibney (Paul Kruger, a tall, lanky actor who looks like an unformed beta
version of Clark Gable but hardly has anything resembling Gable’s charisma or
talent), who challenges him to a fight — which Van Luyn wins easily, presumably
through boxing moves he learned in prep school. Van Luyn eventually reveals
that he had no intention of giving all his money away — he just said that in order to get the Thayers to
allow him to move them into a new house he’s going to build for his new
extended clan
The Idle Rich is
an odd movie not only because it’s uncertainly perched between Left and Right
message-wise — the moral, to the extent there is one, is that once you latch
onto a rich guy make sure he stays
rich so he can lavish the benefits of a fortune on your and your family, and
above all don’t him get any damned-fool notions about philanthropy — but for a
1929 talkie it’s technically crude in some ways and highly sophisticated in
others. There is no background
music, other than a phonograph supposedly belonging to one of the Thayers’
neighbors that plays a really old and scratchy pop record about true love (the
first time we hear it it’s clearly supposed to be an ironic contrast with what
we’ve just seen before it, which is Joan Thayer seeing William Van Luyn into
his voluntary exile from her bedroom), not even under the opening credits, and
there are several parts of the movie in which the sound stops altogether and
other parts in which the actors make audible slips in their lines and Big
Brother DeMille didn’t stop to retake. But for a 1929 talkie the staging of the
dialogue scenes is surprisingly naturalistic and modern: there are none of the
long … dreary … pauses between lines that make a lot of early talkies virtually
unwatchable today; the actors speak in normal tones of voice, phrase their
conversations as they would in real life, and even interrupt each other and
talk at once when they’re playing people having an argument. (Watching a movie
like Behind That Curtain, a
virtual compendium of everything that could go wrong in an early talkie, one can readily see why some
critics of the time actually thought sound films were less, not more, realistic than silent ones.)
My big
problem with The Idle Rich is
that I have a hard time with movies whose makers couldn’t decide whether they
were comedy or drama, so they tried to make them both and succeed only in
making them neither; for much of the first two acts I was wishing MGM had gone
all-out for comedy and cast Buster Keaton in Nagel’s role, not only because
Beranger’s script obliges Nagel to do some rather wimpy-looking pratfalls and a
slapstick master like Keaton could have made these scenes uproarious, but
because with Keaton in the lead this film would have been a worthy successor to
The Navigator, Battling Butler
and the other Keaton silents in which (in what I’ve long thought was a
deliberate attempt to differentiate himself from Chaplin’s “Tramp” by setting
himself up clear at the other end of the socioeconomic scale) he played
upper-class twits brought down to earth by the love of a good but much less
affluent woman. But Keaton would have had a much harder time playing Act III —
and Nagel, as overly made up, pasty-faced and whiny as he is (in the 1931 film The
Right of Way he was clearly miscast in a
potentially powerful role that cried out for John Barrymore), actually works
for this part: a stuck-up man who’s trying to get himself un-stuck but isn’t
always getting the best advice from the people he’s around.
