Safe in Hell (Warner Bros. as "First National," 1931)

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

Later in the evening my husband Charles and I watched a new Warner Home Archive Blu-Ray release of one of my favorite films, the 1931 drama Safe in Hell, directed by William Wellman from a script by Joseph Jackson and Maude Fulton based on a play by Houston Branch. (I haven’t been able to find a production history for this play online and Branch’s Wikipedia page identifies him only as a screenwriter. Perhaps, like Murray Burnett’s and Joan Allison’s play Everybody Comes to Rick’s – the basis for the film Casablanca – Warner Bros. bought the film rights before the play was produced.) I’ve written about Safe in Hell before on moviemagg (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2013/07/10-more-unjustly-neglected-films-by.html) in an article called “10 More Unjustly Neglected Films by Great Directors,” my response to a previous post by Alan Howell at http://whatculture.com/film/10-unjustly-forgotten-films-by-famous-directors.php. Safe in Hell is the sort of film that could only have been made in the U.S. during the so-called “pre-Code” period of relatively loose enforcement of the Hollywood Production Code between 1930, when the Code was first promulgated, and 1934, when women’s groups in general and the Legion of Decency (a pressure group founded and financed by the U.S. branch of the Roman Catholic Church) in particular organized a campaign to pressure Hollywood into ultra-strict enforcement of it. We pick up the central character, Gilda Carlson (Dorothy Mackaill), after she’s already taken a tumble down the moral ladder in the backstory. She started dating a slimeball named Piet Van Saal (Ralf Harolde) until one night when Van Saal’s wife walked in on them making out (and possibly doing much more than that). Of course Van Saal had never bothered to tell Gilda he was married, but word got around and she was reduced to working as a prostitute.

As the film begins she gets word from her madam, Angie (Cecil Cunningham), that she has a client at the Claybourne Apartments. She goes there, but to her horror her John for the evening is Piet Van Saal, who hasn’t fallen out of lust for her. Piet assures her that his wife is out of town and therefore won’t be able to walk in on them, but Gilda is horrified at once again having to have sex with the monster who ruined her in the first place. They have a fight, in the course of which Gilda accidentally starts a fire that soon burns out of control and consumes the whole building. Wanted for manslaughter in Piet’s death, Gilda seeks the help of the one decent male in her entire life, sailor Carl Bergen (Donald Cook). He stows her away on his ship and the two flee to the Caribbean island of Tortuga, an independent nation that has no extradition treaties with any other country in the world and therefore has become a haven for criminals. Carl and Gilda decide to get married on Tortuga, but they can’t because the minister of the island’s one church died the previous month and his replacement won’t arrive for another month. So, like Lucia and Edgardo in Donizetti’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor, Carl and Gilda stand in front of the altar and do a D.I.Y. ceremony on their own. Then, after Carl’s ship leaves, Gilda settles into a nasty stay at Tortuga’s only hotel, where a whole group of horny scumbags – including the island’s chief law enforcement officer, Bruno (Morgan Wallace), as well as General Emmanuel Jesus Maria Gomez (Victor Varconi, four years after he played a similar role as Pontius Pilate in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1927 Jesus biopic The King of Kings), Egan (John Wray), Crunch (Ivan Simpson) and Larson (former Professor Moriarty Gustav von Seyffertitz) – set out to break her down and get her in bed. Only Gilda is determined to remain faithful to Carl.

Bruno steals all the letters Carl writes Gilda, including the money he’s sending her – another parallel between this story and Lucia di Lammermoor – and Gilda is warned by the hotel’s Black manager, Leonie (Nina Mae McKinney, the “bad girl” from King Vidor’s 1929 all-Black musical Hallelujah), that she’ll have to leave the hotel once the month for which Carl pre-paid is up. Leonie and her porter, Newcastle (Clarence Muse), are among the most sympathetic characters in the film, and it’s to director William Wellman’s credit that, though the script called for them to speak in the usual stupid dialect, he overruled the writers and told McKinney and Muse to speak their lines in normal English. Wellman also used music quite effectively in this film – a rarity in a talkie this relatively early in the sound era – basing most of his score on a song called “Pagan Moon” by Joseph Burke and using Black songs like W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” and Shelton Brooks’s “Darktown Strutters’ Ball” to establish the raffish existence to which circumstances have compelled Gilda. There was also an original song written for this film by Clarence Muse with Black songwriters Leon and Otis René, “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” which Nina Mae McKinney gets to perform. (She’s quite good except I think she rather overdid the orgasmic moans at the start of virtually every line.) Ultimately Piet Van Saal turns up in Tortuga; he faked his own death in the apartment fire, had his wife collect $50,000 on his life insurance, then stole the money from her.

Of course she ratted him out to the authorities, so now he needs to be in a place from which he can’t be extradited – while Gilda reacts to the news that Piet is alive with a mixture of horror and joy. The horror is because Piet is still after her body; the joy is because if he’s still alive, she’s no longer wanted for killing him and therefore she and Carl can get back together and settle down in the U.S. Only Piet tries to rape Gilda again, and Gilda kills him – for real this time – with a gun Bruno slipped her. Bruno warned her that even having a gun at all is against Tortugan law, and when she’s put on trial for killing Piet her attorney, Jones (future Emperor Ming Charles Middleton) is about to win her acquittal on self-defense grounds when Bruno tells her that just by having the gun with which she shot Piet, she broke Tortugan law and will be sentenced to six months in a prison he runs. Bruno tells her flat-out that her sentence can be easy or hard depending on whether or not she’s willing to have sex with him. Gilda’s reaction is to run back into the courtroom and tell the judge and jurors that she’d previously lied; her new story is that she shot Piet in cold blood because they’d been lovers, only she’d tired of him. This gets her an automatic death sentence, and just as we’re sure that Wellman and his writers will figure out a way to bring Carl back into the picture and the two of them will flee Tortuga and presumably live happily ever after, Carl does turn up but Gilda bids him a fond farewell and then, once he’s left, walks nobly down the beach to where the gallows awaits her.

Charles and I saw Safe in Hell years ago and the thing that made the biggest impression on me is it dared an unhappy ending when there were all too many Hollywood conventions available to create a happy one. I was also flabbergasted by how well Dorothy Mackaill acted her role; she was an actress that had a brief vogue in the early 1930’s and I’d always been curious about her. She was so powerful in Safe in Hell I eagerly sought out some of her other films – and found her mediocre in virtually all of them, including Love Affair (1932), a quickie at Columbia in which her co-star was the young Humphrey Bogart. Alas, it was a dull and ordinary story in which Bogart is a flight instructor with a design for a revolutionary new airplane motor, and Mackaill is a spoiled heiress who distracts Bogart from his attempted start-up. Apparently Wellman worked the same magic on Mackaill that Alfred Hitchcock did with Grace Kelly two decades later. Safe in Hell is a movie that deserves to be far better known than it is; it’s essentially a film noir about a decade before film noir became a “thing.” Wellman and his cinematographer, Sid Hickox, don’t go for much in the way of the chiaroscuro look usually associated with noir, but they keep the camera in almost constant motion (at a time when there was an open cold war between directors and cinematographers over whether to move the camera during a scene; cinematographers were organizing to ban the practice because it took too much time and money to light moving-camera shots, while directors kept insisting on them) and the settings are appropriately grungy.

Also, I read on the “Trivia” section of the imdb.com page for Safe in Hell that Barbara Stanwyck was actually up for the part of Gilda, but she lost it to Mackaill because her contract was split between Warner Bros. and Columbia, and Columbia wanted her back (to make one of her weaker films, Frank Capra’s Forbidden, a romantic melodrama that so blatantly ripped off Fannie Hurst’s Back Street it even used the same male lead, John Boles, who’d just made a version of Back Street). It’s a long-standing joke between Charles and I that such-and-such a film would have been better with Barbara Stanwyck in it (Charles, being Charles, even started saying that about films Stanwyck actually was in!), but as much as I love Barbara Stanwyck (I consider her the greatest movie actress of all time, largely because of her versatility; she played more different kinds of roles than anyone else in the classic era and only one other actress, Meryl Streep, has come close to her since), I’m not sure she would have been better in this part. Stanwyck would likely have given us a feistier, more independent reading of Gilda than Mackaill’s, but she wouldn’t have been as believable in nailing the character’s world-weariness and resignation to her fate at the end. If I could wish for one change in the casting of Safe in Hell, it would be to have Mackaill’s Love Affair co-star, the young Humphrey Bogart, in Donald Cook’s role; with his own capacity for world-weariness and his grim determination, verging on stoicism, that would ultimately make him a superstar and had already been hinted at early on in his career in the 1930 film Up the River (co-starring Spencer Tracy and directed by John Ford!), Bogart could handily have aced the good but shallow Cook.