by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago Charles and I
ran a movie: Discarded Lovers, a recent download from archive.org and a very interesting 1932 movie
from a company called Tower Productions — though I must confess I was fooled
and thought the production company was “Eminent Studios” because that was the
first thing I saw when I tested the download before burning it to DVD. It
turned out that this was one of those annoying archive.org downloads put up by
a person who lopped off the opening and closing credits to save space, and “Eminent
Studios” was the name of the fictitious movie company most of the dramatis personae worked for. It’s a murder mystery centered around
star Irma Gladden (Natalie Moorhead — so we were watching this very interesting
actress the second night in a row, once again playing her typecasting as a
villainess), who when she isn’t making movies is busy seducing every man within
striking distance. She’s turned her ex-husband André Leighton (played by Roy
D’Arcy in a performance that’s obviously channeling John Barrymore, the real-life model for his character as he
was for Norman Maine in the original A Star Is Born) into a drunken wretch — though he’s still her
co-star in her current film — along with her director, Warren Sibley (Robert
Frazer); her writer, Rex Foresythe (Jason Robards, Sr. — father of the later
Jason Robards who did all those O’Neill plays on Broadway and briefly became
Lauren Bacall’s second husband); her chauffeur, Ralph Norman (Jack Trent), who
when she dumps him gets his revenge by stealing one of her rings and pawning
it, only he gets caught; a hanger-on, Robert Worth (Allen Dailey) who’s
supposed to be a previous husband of Irma’s but that isn’t that clear in the
film itself (especially since he looks younger than just about everyone else in the cast and for
her to have married and broken up with him and then married Andre, she’d
practically have had to snag him out of grade school); and just about every
other guy in the cast except Bob Adair (Russell Hopton), a New York reporter
who’s in Hollywood on vacation, just solved another murder case and gets
impressed on this one when the police, headed by Chief Sommers (J. Farrell
McDonald) and Sgt. Delaney (Fred Kelsey, oddly made up to look like an
“Italian” type even though his last name indicates he’s supposed to be playing
Irish), find Irma shot to death in the back of her car and figure that since
Bob was so much help the last time …
Discarded Lovers is one of the most cynical movies Hollywood ever
made about itself — even The Death Kiss, filmed a year later and also a murder mystery set inside a studio in
which an actor is killed during the making of a film, isn’t this nasty towards
Hollywood and the people who work there — and for the first half-hour or so
it’s an utterly marvelous movie, powered by the woman-you-love-to-hate
performance of Natalie Moorhead as Irma. Then, alas, she gets dispatched and
the second half of the movie is considerably less interesting, though its
actual writers, Arthur Hoerl and Edward T. Lowe, Jr., came up with a clever
conceit: the writer Rex Forsythe turns out to be the murderer, and Bob Adair
figures it out by noting the similarities between the real-life situations and
the plot of the movie Irma had just finished making when she was killed,
particularly the plot twist that the character Andre Leighton was playing
installed his sister as Irma’s character’s secretary to keep tabs on her, and
the real Andre Leighton installed
his actual sister, Valerie Christine (Barbara Weeks, who seems to be in the mix
mainly to provide a “nice” girl for Bob Adair to end up with at the end), as
Irma’s real secretary for precisely the same reason. Like a lot of early-1930’s
indies, Discarded Lovers could
have benefited from a more Gothic, proto-noir look instead of the clearly photographed scenes
created by director Fred Newmeyer and cinematographer William Hyer, but even as
it stands it’s quite a nice little movie and one in which, unlike a lot of
mysteries from the period, we actually do care whodunit.
