Jewel Robbery (Warner Bros., 1933)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Saturday, April 27) I watched a couple of films on Turner Classic Movies once I got home from the San Diego Master Chorale concert at St. Paul’s. One was shown as part of a double-feature salute featuring director Rian Johnson (who, by the way, pronounces his first name “Ryan” – I’d always assumed it was “REE-un”), who showed two surprisingly similar films for his salute to the double-feature era in classic Hollywood. The reason it was a surprise is that in the actual classic era, the films paired in double features were usually wildly different in order to attract as many audience members, with different tastes, as possible. One of the most powerful scenes in Charles Jackson’s alcoholism novel The Lost Weekend (left out, alas, in the movie made from it) is one in which Don Birnam, the alcoholic protagonist, buys a ticket to a movie theatre that is showing a revival of the 1936 Camille with Greta Garbo. Unfortunately, he enters the theatre while the second feature is playing, and that movie is a crude, noisy gangster film from a cheap studio that only further frazzles Don’s already stressed nerves. Having been at the concert, I missed the first film in Johnson’s double bill – Ernst Lubitsch’s comic masterpiece Trouble in Paradise (1932), a story about high-end European jewel thieves directed by Ernst Lubitsch and adapted by Samson Raphaelson and Grover Jones from a play by Hungarian writer Aladár László. The stars of Trouble in Paradise were Miriam Hopkins, Kay Francis and Herbert Marshall, and it was released just before Warner Bros. staged a major talent raid on Paramount’s roster and came up with Kay Francis, William Powell and Ruth Chatterton.

So Jack Warner, his production chief Darryl F. Zanuck and the others on Warners’ production staff decided they’d do their own Trouble in Paradise. They’d use Kay Francis as the female lead, cast William Powell in Marshall’s role and likewise assign the film to an expatriate German director (William Dieterle) and base it on a Hungarian play (by Ladislaus Fodor instead of Aladár László), adapted by Erwin Gelsey (who four years later would come up with the original story for the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical Swing Time) from an English translation of Fodor’s play by Bertram Bloch. They called their film simply Jewel Robbery, though at least two jewel robberies occur during its relatively brief 68-minute running time. They’re both masterminded by a character identified only as “The Robber” (William Powell), who meticulously plans his crimes so he and his confederates neither kill anybody nor get into trouble with the law. The second robbery, at Holländer Jewelers, owned by Holländer (Lee Kohlmar), occurs just as Baroness Teri von Horhenfels (Kay Francis) has inveigled both her husband (Henry Kolker) and one of her current extra-relational partners, Paul (Hardie Albright) to take her to the store to buy her the supposedly cursed Excelsior diamond ring. When Powell’s crew visits the store to rob it, Teri finds the whole experience quite thrilling and immediately falls for the suave thief. Powell’s character gives Holländer a marijuana-laced cigarette that causes him to lose consciousness and forget the details of the robbery when he finally comes to – the obvious drug reference (the drug in the cigarette is never directly identified, but it’s clear what it is), along with the free and easy sexual morals (or lack thereof), definitely mark this as a product of the so-called “pre-Code” era in Hollywood history.

The robber orders Baron von Horhenfels and Paul, an Austrian cabinet minister, to spend the night together locked in the store’s safe. He spares Teri that fate because he wants to make love to her, which they do. The robber hides the case containing the jewels he stole that night in Teri’s own safe, arguing that they’re safer there than anyone else, and stages a false arrest with a gang member (Alan Mowbray) impersonating a policeman to get the real police off their case. (There’s an unusual bit of anti-type casting: Clarence Wilson, a character actor who generally played villains, is the chief of the Vienna police.) Teri and the robber agree to meet again in Nice, France once he leaves Vienna because it’s become too hot for him, and Teri gives a false description of the robber (telling the real police he’s old and fat) and winks at the camera as she tells her husband that she must immediately go to Nice because she needs a respite from all the intense emotional strain of having been robbed. Jewel Robbery is an estimable movie, having much the same cheeky insouciance as Trouble in Paradise (its obvious inspiration), and in his outro Rian Johnson called Trouble in Paradise and Jewel Robbery two of Kay Francis’s three best films. Francis’s own choice for her best movie was the third Johnson mentioned: One-Way Passage, another co-starring vehicle for her and William Powell in which he played a convict being extradited for certain execution, and she played a fatally ill woman, who meet on a ship and have a doomed love affair. And my choice for the best Kay Francis film would be her Florence Nightingale biopic, The White Angel (1936), also directed by Dieterle. I remember the first time I saw The White Angel I found myself wishing either Katharine Hepburn or Bette Davis had starred in it, but on my last go-round I was quite impressed by Francis’s subtlety and in particular the way she brought the feminist message to the fore with discretion and grace instead of hammering it home the way Davis or Hepburn would have in the role.