by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Sin Takes a
Holiday, a 1930 production from
the U.S. branch of Pathé just before it merged with RKO (though at first the
Radio Corporation of America operated the two studios separately and it wasn’t
until they hired David O. Selznick as production chief in 1932 that he arranged
to merge the two, sensibly given what the Depression had done to the economics
of the movie industry), and it contributed a lot of people who became major RKO
hands over the years — including art director Carroll Clark, who gives us some
stunning Art Deco interiors with those huge wood-paneled doors and would later
design all but one of the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers films made at RKO. The
cinematographer, John Mescall, would later team with director James Whale for The
Bride of Frankenstein and the 1936 Show Boat at Universal, and the editor, Danny Mandell, would
later work in that capacity for Samuel Goldwyn for years. The director of Sin
Takes a Holiday was Paul L. Stein, a
Vienna-born filmmaker who made his directorial debut in 1918 and made his first
U.S. film, My Official Wife, a Russian-set drama taking place just before the Revolution, for Warner
Bros. in 1926. He made this film right after The Lottery Bride, a United Artists disaster (artistic and commercial) for Jeanette MacDonald in 1930, and
his next two films after Sin Takes a Holiday, Born to Love and The Common Law, were also vehicles for the star Constance
Bennett, whose billing in Sin Takes a Holiday was not only over the title but actually larger
than it! Written by Horace Jackson from a story by Robert Milton and Dorothy
Cairns, Sin Takes a Holiday is a pretty predictable film, though clearly a product of the
“pre-Code” glasnost in its
easy acceptance of divorce and marital non-permanence. Bennett plays Sylvia
Brenner, secretary to divorce attorney Gaylord Stanton (Kenneth MacKenna, dull
as usual — he turned in a great performance in a small Howard Hughes-esque role
in Charles Vidor’s excellent proto-noir Sensation Hunters but every other film I’ve seen him in he’s been
stolid and unimpressive).
She’s got a decidedly unrequited crush on Gaylord,
who’s in the middle of having an affair with one of his clients, Grace Lawrence
(Rita LaRoy), only her husband (her third; Gaylord has already represented her
in getting rid of the first two) is planning to name Gaylord as the
co-respondent, and Gaylord is worried that this will kill his practice by
embarrassing him publicly. He’s also worried that Rita wants to make him
husband number four — and will extract from him as crippling a financial
settlement as she got out of husbands one and two. To avoid all this, Gaylord
accepts a suggestion from one of his wastrel friends, Richards (Louis John
Bartels), that he make a marriage in name only with someone else. Richards
boasts that he and his wife have an understanding that allows them to call
themselves married but doesn’t require them to do anything about it: they can
travel apart, they can lead largely separate lives, and they can have sex with
anyone they want — which doesn’t seem to include each other. Gaylord offers
precisely this sort of marriage to Sylvia, oblivious that she’s really in love
with him and the sort of marriage she would want with him would be the more conventional kind in
which the two people involved actually do live together, have sex only with each other, and ultimately have
children. She accepts and he immediately gives her the money for a vacation in
Paris, on which she’s followed by another of Gaylord’s friends, Reggie Durant
(Basil Rathbone), who’s obviously after Sylvia. He puts her up in an expensive
hotel (thereby giving Carroll Clark the opportunity to create another opulent set similar to the live-work space Gaylord
inhabits back in New York — indeed, one practically expects the stars of
Clark’s later films, Astaire and Rogers, to come swooping through it in the
middle of a dance number) and encourages her to buy a lot of high-fashion
clothes on Gaylord’s dime. She has her vacation, Grace does her level best to
break up her marriage to Gaylord, but eventually what we knew from reel one was
going to happen duly happens and Gaylord and Sylvia end up in a clinch, telling
us that from then on they’re going to have a real marriage and not just a paper one.
The story is
awfully pat but a director like Lubitsch might have made it genuinely
interesting; Stein, who shared little with Lubitsch but his ancestry from a
German-speaking country, does a few reasonably creative camera moves (including
a surprising number of pan shots, a technique classic-era Hollywood almost never used in interiors) but proves unable to do much
with his actors. It seems weird that in three consecutive films with Constance
Bennett he got three completely different performances out of her: in Sin
Takes a Holiday she underacts relentlessly
— as if her idea of playing a homely woman is to speak all her lines in a
monotone. She’s supposed to do a transformation from drab secretary in the
opening reels to glamorous socialite wife in the later ones, but whereas Bette
Davis would manage a similar transformation to perfection in Now, Voyager a decade later, Bennett just looks dull, drab and
droopy on both ends of the “change” and the only visible difference is she’s
dressed considerably better later on. In Born to Love Bennett and Stein seemed to overcompensate and
have her overact relentlessly, and in The
Common Law he finally got a balanced
performance out of her; as I wrote about that film previously, “If Stein didn’t
bring to The Common Law quite
the same baroque visual style he had to parts of Born to Love, he didn’t let Constance Bennett chew the scenery
and get away with the ultra-hammy gestures she’d used in the earlier film
either — and the plot was stronger this time around, too.”
But none of these three films with Stein showcases Bennett
anywhere nearly as effectively as What Price Hollywood?, the prototype for A Star Is Born she made in 1932 with Selznick producing and
George Cukor directing (superbly; Cukor would turn down the 1937 A Star Is
Born because he thought the
story was too close, but he’d change his mind when the chance to make the 1954
version with Judy Garland and James Mason came around). Sin Takes a Holiday is most notable for Basil Rathbone’s appearance;
saddled with a “roo” moustache and appallingly ill-cast (he could do dastardly
villainy and ringing heroism — well, you name me another actor, besides John Barrymore, who played
both Sherlock Holmes and Richard III! — but he’s unbelievable as a lounge
lizard threatening Our Heroine’s virtue), he’s still the most watchable person
in the movie, and though some of Rathbone’s early talkies feature an annoyingly
chipper voice, here he’s got the authoritative “Rathbone ring” that made both
his Holmes movies and the best of his villain roles (notably Sir Guy of
Gisbourne in the Errol Flynn Adventures of Robin Hood) so good and made him a star on spoken-word
records for Columbia. Here he barrels ahead through the script and Stein’s
indifferent direction, making an impression in spite of the thin material and Bennett’s numbingly
impassive performance — as if her character thought the way to fend off his
advances was to give a remarkably good impersonation of a rock. One other
quirky thing about Sin Takes a Holiday: why are both the opening and closing credits printed against the
backdrop of a picture of a yacht? No such boat appears in the film!
