by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched a movie I’d recently recorded from TCM
as part of a mini-tribute to Irene Dunne: No Other Woman, a 1932 production from RKO personally produced by
David O. Selznick during his one-year tenure as production chief there, with
Dunne billed over the title in the sort of movie you think you’ve seen before whether or not you have. It’s a
Warners-esque proletarian drama in which the principals all live in Steel Town
and work at, you guessed it, the local steel mill: Jim Stanley (Charles
Bickford) is a mill worker who’s gradually working his way up to foreman, Anna
(Irene Dunne) is the company bookkeeper and Joe Zarcovia (Eric Linden) runs the
time clock. Jim is in love with Anna but she’s unwilling to marry him because
she doesn’t want to be stuck in Steel Town all her life; eventually they tie
the knot and have a son, Bobbie (Buster Miles), but Anna’s determination to
make something of themselves and make a life outside Steel Town leads her
carefully to husband her husband’s earnings, keep most of them in a savings
account and get additional money by taking in boarders, including Joe. (For
much of the film I thought Joe was Anna’s younger brother, but he wasn’t.) Joe
is also an inventor who’s figured out a way to take the waste from steel
production and turn it into a new dye that’s more permanent than any other on
the market. Anna wants to invest the Stanleys’ savings into Joe’s invention,
but Joe is tired of having to economize and announces that he’s going to take
his latest paycheck and blow it all in one night on alcohol. As things turn
out, he blows it on something more than alcohol: he comes home with another
woman on his arm, and though he insists she’s just a drinking buddy and means
nothing to him — at least nothing that would threaten his and Anna’s marriage —
he feels guilty enough the next morning that in order to atone to his wife, he
tells her to go ahead and invest their money in Joe’s dye. Jim and Joe form a
company to exploit the invention, and within the space of a spectacular montage
by Slavko Vorkapich (who’s credited with “transitional effects”) it’s a
multi-million dollar concern with a factory complex of its own and both Joe and
the Stanleys are millionaires.
Only — wouldn’t you know it? — Jim’s still got
the proverbial roving eye; he ends up spending a lot of time in New York City
in “conferences” with investors and bankers, and during one of these trips a
gold-digger named Margot Van Dearing (Gwili André) gets her hooks into Jim and
starts an affair with him. Margot is really being manipulated by her actual
lover, attorney Bonelli (J. Carrol Naish), but — against Bonelli’s advice — she
ultimately demands that Jim either divorce his wife and marry her, or say
goodbye to her forever. Jim agrees but Anna doesn’t, and as a result Jim and
Bonelli (who’s serving as Jim’s lawyer) hatch a plot to bribe the Stanleys’
servants to give false testimony at the divorce trial that Anna was the one having the affair — even though it gets
pretty hard to believe when the man they produce as Anna’s alleged lover,
Sutherland (Theodore Von Eltz), is the sort of nerdy milquetoast who generally
inhabited stories like this as the querulous hotel clerk uncertain of the
morality of his guests’ relationships, not a partaker in adultery (either as
cuckolder or cuckoldee) himself. Jim not only wins his divorce case, he also
wins custody of Bobbie — ya remember Bobbie? — only at the thought of losing her child, Anna
freaks out in court and says she was
having affairs, and the court can’t award custody of Bobbie to Jim because Jim
isn’t his natural father. Then Jim
has his own hissy-fit and confesses in court that he set up the whole thing;
that his wife is blameless and he not only lied under oath but bribed his
servants to lie as well. For this Jim is sentenced to five years for perjury
and suborning perjury, and though he’s paroled after one year his company goes
under when its stock price plummets due to the scandals, and ultimately he,
Anna and Joe all return to Steel Town and the nothing proletarian jobs they
were holding down at the start of the movie.
No Other Woman, directed by the quite interesting J. Walter Ruben
with a major assist from Vorkapich and his “transitions,” is well directed and
competently acted — especially by Bickford, who’s just right for his part as a
hard-working proletarian in over his head among the rich — but the script by
Wanda Tuchock and Bernard Schubert, from an “original” story by Owen Francis,
is so predictable — and also so
annoying in its classism: like a lot of other movies of the period (including
many of Bickford’s other vehicles), it seems to take a perverse joy out of
crushing the ambitions of our honest steelworker whose only failing is a
fondness for booze and women. It’s one of those stories that basically outright
says to the blue-collar audience, “Don’t even think of going into business for yourself and getting
ahead. You’re precisely where nature meant you to be, and if you try to rise
above your place you’ll just make yourself and everyone around you miserable
and you’ll end up back where you belong, anyway.” The U.S. has always had a
peculiar attitude towards inherited wealth; we were sufficiently appalled by
the landed nobility of the United Kingdom that we inserted in our constitution
a provision that no American government official could ever accept a title of nobility — yet over
and over again we’ve gravitated to hierarchical arrangements in which wealth
stayed in prominent families from generation to generation, from the
slaveholders of the ante-bellum South and the “patroons” of early New York
state to the Rockefellers, Morgans, Chases, Fords, and now the Waltons (as in
Wal-Mart) and the Kochs. Indeed, if there’s been a change in the American
ideology it’s that we’ve even intensified our worship of money from what it was throughout the nation’s history
— and the notion of people being superior because they’ve had money in their
family for several generations has become at least partially sidetracked by the
idea that people are superior simply because they have money, here and now. A modern-day remix of No
Other Woman would come down less hard on
Jim Stanley than the 1932 version did — it would probably re-invent him as an
Ayn Rand character who lost all his money and then, because of his innate
superiority over the common run of mankind, made it all back again and more,
and in the meantime laid down the law to his wife that he was going to fuck any
woman he wanted any time he wanted and, precisely because he was a capitalist
superman, she wasn’t going to be allowed to stand in his way.
