by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched a
movie together; Forgotten, an unexpectedly interesting film from the Chesterfield-Invincible
company in 1933, directed by Richard Thorpe (whose directorial credit is in the
form of a signature, an honor usually reserved for more prestigious directors
like Erich von Stroheim) from a story and script by Harry Sauber. The credits
are somewhat confused in that the opening title reads, “Maury M. Cohen Presents
Forgotten, a Geo. R. Batcheller
Production” — ordinarily Batcheller headed Chesterfield and Cohen headed
Invincible (though they were actually two branches of the same company and both
above- and below-the-line personnel freely bounced back and forth between them)
— and the opening logo is Invincible’s (an eagle perched on a plinth, not that
different from the 1940’s and 1950’s Republic logo) while the closing credits
feature the Chesterfield logo. There’s also a bit of confusion as to the cast:
the American Film Institute Catalog lists Jean Hersholt, Jr. as playing Hans Strauss, Jr., but there’s no
Hans Strauss, Jr. in the film: he plays the younger version of Hans Strauss
(Selmar Jackson), while his on-screen siblings Louie and Lena are played by
Warren Glasser and Betty Jane Graham, respectively, as children, while their
older selves — in the later part of the movie Hans has renamed himself
“Hannaford” and Louie “Lee” — are Leon Waycoff (later Leon Ames) and June
Clyde.
The real star of Forgotten is Lee Kohlmar as the Strausses’ father, who in the opening scene is
shown boasting to “Uncle Adolph” (Otto Lederer) — though since the character is
of a similar age to Strauss Vater it’s clear he’s called that because he’s the children’s uncle, not Strauss’s own — and it’s never made
clear whether Adolph was the brother of Strauss or his wife, whom we never see
in the film and we presume is deceased — that he now has “privileges” and he is
no longer a foreigner in the U.S. Since both Strauss, Sr. and Adolph are
speaking in thick German accents that sound like vaudeville voices, it’s clear
they’re both immigrants (the film opened with a close-up of the Statue of
Liberty and some stock shots of New York City tenements) but the “privileges”
Strauss, Sr. are referring to are those of an American citizen — he has just
naturalized and proudly shows off his naturalization papers. Then there’s a
shot of a rainy mountainscape and over it the title, “Fifteen Years Later,” and
the already grown Hans, a.k.a. Hannaford, has got older, Louie a.k.a. Lee and
Lena (who alone of the Strauss kids has not changed her first name) are now
adults, Strauss has risen through the class system and is now the owner of the
profitable Strauss Dye Company, and both the Strauss sons have acquired
unpleasantly gold-digging wives, Myrtle (Natalie Moorhead — we know from the credits that she’s a bad girl, not only
because Natalie Moorhead is playing her but because when she’s introduced in
the credits sequence she’s smoking a cigarette, in a script where the different ways the
characters consume tobacco — cigarettes, cigars, pipes — are considered
important indicia of who they are as people) and May (Natalie Kingston).
Under
pressure from Myrtle and May, Hannaford and Lee convince their dad that he
should retire, and eventually Lee and Myrtle force him out of the home he built
with his dye-company earnings and push him into renting space at a home for old
men, where he’s surrounded by quarrelsome, kvetchy codgers and lives an existence he hates but
pretends to love. While all this is going on, Lena has been dating a young man
named Joseph Meyers (William Collier, Jr.), who has invented a new dye process
that, because the system of manufacturing it requires one less processing step,
will be cheaper; also, unlike the Strausses’ existing process, which requires imported
ingredients, the Meyers dye can be produced entirely from raw materials
available in the U.S. — which appeals to Strauss Vater’s patriotism towards his adopted country but which
the Strauss Söhne couldn’t care less about
(which makes their attitude seem far more “modern” than their dad’s!).
Unfortunately, she has to leave him (temporarily) when dad sends her out to
California to look after the fatally ill Uncle Adolph. When she gets back, she
realizes that what’s wrong with her father is he has nothing to do, so she
hatches a plan to use the money Uncle Adolph willed her as capital to found a
rival dye company, the American Dye Company, using her boyfriend’s process and
her dad’s business expertise. American quickly underbids the Strauss company and
within a year the Strauss brothers are forced to declare bankruptcy — only
they’re bailed out by the mysterious owners of American, whom they have no idea
are their father, sister and future brother-in-law.
Shot under the working
title The Fifth Commandment (the one about honoring thy father and mother), Forgotten is an understated drama that thanks to Sauber’s
script and the unsentimental direction of Richard Thorpe avoids the assault on the tear ducts stories like this
usually mount; instead, with its parallels to the story of the prodigal son
(actually referenced in the dialogue, even though this father has two prodigal sons and it’s his daughter who is the responsible one) and King Lear, it’s a classy melodrama in which Lee Kohlmar
creates a haunting character in spite of his near-comic accent. It’s also an
ironic movie in that it’s the father who realizes that the business has to grow, change and adopt new
technologies to survive, while the sons are the “conservative” ones who refuse
to change their production methods until it’s too late. And thanks to
Chesterfield/Invincible’s production and distribution deal with Universal,
though they were an independent company they had the run of a major studio,
including the major studio’s backlog of sets (which is why Charles and I
recognized some of the sets from Universal’s own productions) and even some of
Universal’s personnel, including longtime “gowns” designer Vera West (they even
made that a selling point for their movie by including in the opening credits, “Filmed
at Universal City”!), and most importantly they also had access to
state-of-the-art sound recording equipment, so the dialogue is clear and
audible instead of muddy and buried under hiss the way it was in a lot of
1930’s indies. Forgotten is one
of those minor gems buried in the output of 1930’s Hollywood, a pleasant
time-filler and also a genuinely moving drama.
