by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I screened Charles an
intriguing 1934 “pre-Code” indie called The Moth. The real surprise about The Moth is that it was made under the same auspices as the
unspeakably bad A Scream in the Night a year later (that movie was so awful it wasn’t even released until
1943, eight years after it was made, and then only because its male lead, Lon
Chaney, Jr., had gone on to horror stardom at Universal and a reissue company
named Astor picked up the rights and threw it out for a quick buck), including
director Fred C. Newmeyer (who’d got his start working for Harold Lloyd, first
as supporting player and then as director) — and it proved to be quite good.
Not that the plot by “original” story writer Joseph O’Donnell was all that
fresh or innovative, but Newmeyer’s direction of it was: the film is full of
oblique angles, shadowy proto-noir compositions (the director of photography was George Meehan) and clever
dissolves, including one in which a radio speaker dissolves into a circular
shot of the party where people are doing dances to the radio music, with
varying degrees of lasciviousness. Among the guests at the party is heiress
Diana Wyman (Sally O’Neil, who had co-starred with Joan Crawford and Constance
Bennett in the 1925 MGM film Sally, Irene and Mary, and while she hardly went on to as illustrious a
career as the other two women leads in that film she was a quite capable actress and this role was
perfectly suited to her talents), who’s basically decent but loves the
hard-partying lifestyle and so far has burned through all but $300 of her
income for the year. (Since the Mardi Gras figures prominently in the plot,
she’s managed to do this by mid-March.) Her father died and left her his
fortune, but only in trust and only if she doesn’t get into any scandal that
embarrasses the family name. She does so when she undresses at that party and
does a dance in the nude — and when one of the other guests throws a Cupid
statue through the window of the high-rise apartment where all this is going
on, the cops stage a raid and Diana is arrested. Her guardian, John Gale (Wilfred
Lucas) — described in the imdb.com synopsis as “a lecherous old man who has the
hots for her” but actually portrayed in the film as a pathetic (in both senses)
figure who has an honorable but hopeless crush on her — warns her that her
recent escapade, which has landed her on the front page of one of the New York
papers, has cost her her fortune.
Desperate to escape from New York and all its
bad associations, she takes what little money she has left and heads for a
train station, where she gets a ticket to New Orleans for the Mardi Gras
celebration (the poster advertising it misspells it “Mardy Gras”). Gale sends
George Duncan (Paul Page), traveling engineer for his company, to follow Diana,
and he gets on the same train. So do Marie LeMaire (Rae Daggett), a nightclub
dancer who’s really the notorious jewel thief “The Moth,” and her partner (in
crime and, we get the impression, in bed as well) Don Pedro (Duncan Renaldo,
about the only member of this cast besides O’Neil I’d actually heard of). Marie
has a job dancing at a nightclub during the Mardi Gras celebration, but she’s
also supposed to rendezvous with Don Pedro to give him the jewels she’s been
stealing — only she outsmarts herself: in order to abscond with some of the
jewels herself and dump her partner, she fakes a sprained ankle and asks Diana
to do the dance job in her place. Don Pedro gives Diana the portion of the
stolen jewels he’s holding — since she’s wearing a mask (and the two women look
strikingly alike anyway — only their different hair styles and Daggett’s
slightly taller height and more angular face enable the audience to tell them
apart) he’s mistaken Diana for Marie — and Detective Blake (Fred Kelsey, who
usually played stupid cops but this time was portraying a relatively smart
one), who followed Marie and Don Pedro from New York on the same train as the
other principals, arrests both Diana and George Duncan (ya remember George
Duncan?), who of course by this
time has fallen in love with Diana. Fortunately our two young lovebirds are
able to talk Blake into going after Marie instead; they catch her in her hotel
room with the jewels she was planning to get away with, and Diana announces to
John Gale (ya remember John Gale?) that she’s going to marry George and follow him to his latest job assignment
in Siberia.
The plot line of The Moth isn’t much in synopsis, but it’s actually a quite entertaining movie;
though it’s hardly as “original” as advertised, Joseph O’Donnell’s script is
full of wisecracks — including one early on when Diana says she’d rather wear
pants than dresses and one of her friends says, “You can’t have two pair of
pants marrying each other!” (a line which plays quite differently now than it
no doubt did in 1934!), Newmeyer’s direction is fast-paced and visually
interesting, O’Neil gives her performance the vim and vigor the character
needs, and Rae Daggett also manages to make her character at least partially
sympathetic — though there’s no evidence in the script O’Donnell intended this,
she comes off less as a master jewel thief than as someone forced into a life
of crime and feeling trapped in it, seeing her latest haul as a way to get away
not only from Don Pedro but the whole business of stealing for a living. I
picked The Moth last night as an hour-long
time filler and got a surprisingly good movie, well above the norm for an
early-1930’s indie and taking full advantage of the “pre-Code” glasnost — when the opening scene showed Sally O’Neil in
her underwear we knew right away we were in “pre-Code” land!
