I watched one of those legendary movies that I never thought I’d actually get a chance to see: Sadie Thompson, Gloria Swanson’s 1927 production of W. Somerset Maugham’s short story “Miss Thompson” and the resulting hit stage adaptation, Rain. (It would be filmed twice more: in 1932 as Rain, with Joan Crawford and Walter Huston under Lewis Milestone’s direction; and in 1953 as Miss Sadie Thompson, with Rita Hayworth and José Ferrer.) Unfortunately, as Gloria Swanson noted in her 1979 autobiography, the one extant print of this film is missing the last reel (and suffers from a lot of nitrate deterioration even in the parts that do exist, especially — peculiarly enough — during the rain-soaked exteriors; at times the rain seems to be composed as much of nitrate as it is of water), which in this version (a 1987 video release from Kino International) was reconstructed from production stills and a few fragments of film that survived in Swanson’s own archives. Despite the deficiencies of the extant print, however, enough survives to establish the film as a masterpiece, with tight, atmospheric direction by Raoul Walsh (who also played the part of Tim “Handsome” O’Hara, the Marine whom Sadie Thompson finally ends up with at the end — this may be the only movie in Hollywood history which shows the producer and the director making love to each other![1]) and (even through the nitrate burns) beautiful photography by George Barnes, Robert Kurrle and Oliver Marsh. The acting is quite good; Swanson occasionally lapses into the highly gestural, stylized overacting that abounded in the silent days, but for the most part her performance is marvelously intense, and as usual while watching her in silent films I couldn’t help but think of the great line Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett and D. M. Marshman gave her in Sunset Boulevard: “We didn’t need dialogue — we had faces!” Lionel Barrymore as Davidson (in deference to the Hays Office Swanson couldn’t outright say that Sadie Thompson was a prostitute or Davidson a minister, but she left in enough implications that any audience member over the mental age of about 10 could figure out what the story was really about) was chillingly understated and devastatingly effective — he’s one actor who, reversing the usual trend, got more hammy, not less, when talkies came in — and Raoul Walsh proved surprisingly effective as an actor, looking oddly like a young Humphrey Bogart in his role as O’Hara. (Alas, his acting career was cut short while he was making his first talkie, In Old Arizona, in which he was slated both to direct and to star as the Cisco Kid; a stray bullet took out one of his eyes and forced his replacement by Irving Cummings behind the cameras and Warner Baxter in front of them.[2]) Sadie Thompson proved a surprisingly sophisticated film, ably capturing the moral ambiguity of Maugham’s original story and creating characters multifaceted enough to be acceptable as genuine human beings. — 12/15/97
•••••
The film was Sadie
Thompson, produced by
and starring Gloria Swanson in her second film under contract to United
Artists, filmed in 1927 and released in 1928 — and, alas, extant only in a
heavily nitrate-damaged print with the last reel missing completely (the
version in circulation today attempts to reconstruct the last reel from production
stills and fragments of outtake footage found among Swanson’s effects after her
death). Ironically, it was one of the movies I recorded on VHS the very first
day we had Turner Classic Movies on our cable menu, as part of a program about
movies that had troubles with the censors — and it was immediately followed
with the 1933 film Baby Face,
which though starring my all-time favorite actress, Barbara Stanwyck, seemed to
be meretricious and dull, full of too many of Hollywood’s favorite teasing
cop-outs whereas Sadie Thompson
had dealt honestly with issues of sex, morality and religious mania. The tale
began as a short story called “Miss Thompson” by W. Somerset Maugham, one of
his South Seas-set tales in which a free-living prostitute named Sadie Thompson
(Gloria Swanson) ends up stranded on the island of Pago-Pago by a driving
rainstorm and a smallpox-related quarantine that delays for 10 days the ship
that’s supposed to take her to Apia for an unspecified “job.” While there she’s
assailed by Reverend Alfred Davidson (Lionel Barrymore), who loathes her and
her lifestyle and is determined to “redeem” her for Christianity and moralism.
There are other characters, including Davidson’s wife (Blanche Friderici);
another American couple, Dr. and Mrs. MacPhail (Charles Lane and Florence
Midgley), a pair of middle-aged white people whose relative tolerance is
contrasted with the fierce moralism of the Davidsons; trader Joe Horn (James A.
Marcus), whose inn is the center of the action because it’s where all the other
characters are staying, and his Polynesian wife Ameena (Sofia Ortega), who
comes off on screen as a prototype of Bloody Mary from South Pacific; along with Marine sergeant Tim
“Handsome” O’Hara (Raoul Walsh) and a company of Marines who are interested in Sadie
both because she’s fun to party with and they’re potential customers for her
services. Eventually Davidson worms out of Sadie the information that she’s
wanted for an unspecified but serious crime in San Francisco, and he determines
not only to reclaim her soul but to have her deported back there to serve her
sentence even though she insists she’s innocent (of whatever the original
charge was). Only in the meantime Davidson has started to have lustful dreams
about Sadie himself, and eventually he tries to rape her; she fights him off,
and in a daze of self-loathing and guilt he kills himself and Sadie, once the
rain clears and ships can go in and out of Pago-Pago again, goes off to
Australia to wait for O’Hara, who’s fallen genuinely in love with her and wants
to marry her, to join her there once his enlistment ends in four weeks.
In 1922
playwrights John Colton and Clemence Randolph adapted “Miss Thompson” into a
play called Rain,
which became an overnight sensation and made a star out of Jeanne Eagels, the
tragically doomed actress who played Sadie in the Broadway production. In the
normal order of things Rain
was the sort of huge mega-success — it became so famous that even people who
hadn’t got near enough to Broadway to see it nonetheless quoted its lines, and
“You’re acting like Reverend Davidson” became an all-purpose insult directed at
moralists of all stripes (including just about anyone who thought Prohibition
was a good idea) — the film studios would have snapped up. But 1922 wasn’t a
normal year in Hollywood; it was the year of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle’s three
trials for the alleged rape and murder of starlet Virginia Rappé at a drunken
party in San Francisco (Arbuckle was eventually acquitted, and most modern
historians believe Rappé died of an infection from a botched illegal abortion,
but he lost his Paramount contract and no other studio would hire him), and the
mysterious, still-unsolved murder of director William Desmond Taylor, which
took down the careers of Arbuckle’s former co-star Mabel Normand and Mary Miles
Minter, both of whom had been acquainted with Taylor (though no more than
“acquainted” because Taylor was actually Gay). So the heads of the major
studios, fearing and wanting to forestall mandatory government censorship of
movies (a real concern because in 1912 the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that
movies were merely “a business” and therefore films were not a form of “speech” protected by the
First Amendment; this was eventually reversed, though not until 1953), hired
Will B. Hays, former Postmaster General under President Warren G. Harding, and
essentially set him up as Hollywood’s chief censor. Though a formal Production
Code wasn’t enacted until 1930 — and it wasn’t all that seriously enforced
until 1934 — Hays almost immediately started issuing lists of what he called
“Don’t’s” and “Be careful’s” telling producers just how far they could go in
treating stories dealing with sex, crime and other chancy themes.
In her
autobiography Gloria Swanson quotes at length from a document written by Hays
which shows all too clearly what she or anyone else was up against in trying to
treat issues of sexual morality seriously on screen with any degree of honesty
and fairness. “There has become prevalent of late a certain type of book and a
certain type of play that deals in theme and situation with certain topics
which in previous years were discussed only in whispers,” Hays wrote in the
mid-1920’s. “Many persons have asked, ‘Why haven’t we seen these in the
movies?’ The reason is very simple. We [the major studio heads that formed
the Motion Picture Producers’ and Distributors’ Association, Hays’ employers] were determined that this type of book
and play should not become the prevalent type of motion picture and to prevent
that we set up what we call ‘The Formula.’ … When any member company is offered
the screen rights to a book or play of a probably questionable nature, its
representatives immediately inform the officers of our association,
representing about 85 percent of the producing elements. If the judgment of the
member company to the effect that the picturization of the subject matter is
inadvisable is confirmed, a notice is sent to all the other member companies,
giving the name of the objectionable book or play. Such company members, thus
having their attention directed to the subject in question, have the
opportunity of avoiding the picturization of the novel or play. More than 150
books and plays, including some of the best sellers and stage successes, have
thus been kept from the screen. Our method, which is of course thoroughly legal
and which has proved efficient, is not censorship in any sense of the word.”
(One thing that struck me when I first read this was Hays’ blithe assumption
that if sexually frank stories were allowed on screen at all, they would
“become the prevalent type of motion picture” — and that this was the type of
evil he had been hired by the studios to prevent.)
Flash-forward to 1927;
Gloria Swanson had turned down a million-dollar contract offer from Paramount,
where she’d been under contract since 1918 and where she’d become a major star
playing mostly upper-class women with fabulous wardrobes, and had signed a deal
to become a producer-star with United Artists alongside the top luminaries in
Hollywood: Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. Though one of
the things that had attracted her to United Artists was that she could pick her
own stories and challenge herself as an actress instead of having to make
cut-to-pattern formula pictures, for her first United Artists production she
decided to play it safe and remake a Clara Kimball Young vehicle, Eyes of
Youth, as The Love of
Sunya. “After Sunya, I knew that an ‘easy,’ so-so picture
took just as much out of a producer as a brilliant, creative picture did,”
Swanson recalled in her autobiography; “therefore, I made up my mind that from
now on I would settle for nothing but the best.” To that end, she first hired
director Raoul Walsh, who was under contract to Fox but was allowed a loan-out
to Swanson’s company for one film. Walsh was just coming off of one of the big
hits of the silent era, Laurence Stallings’ play What Price Glory? — a World War I story in which, though
the titles were bowdlerized, Walsh had had the actors onscreen say
“son-of-a-bitch” and the other (mild, by today’s standards) obscenities
Stallings had written in his script — and Fox had been flooded with shocked
letters from audience members who had lip-read what the actors were saying.
(Lip-reading became a common skill among movie audiences during the silent era,
and frequently they noticed that what the actors were actually saying was quite
different from what the titles said they were saying.) Walsh agreed to work for
Swanson but the two were unable to agree on a story until, after a fruitless
meeting in which they’d bandied various titles back and forth, Walsh sighed and
said, “There’s always Rain”
— even though Will Hays himself had put Rain at the top of his Index Filmum
Prohibitorium. Swanson
initially tricked Hays into giving her project his imprimatur by telling him she was making a film,
not of the hugely successful and controversial play Rain, but of Maugham’s original story — of
which Hays hadn’t heard — and by assuring him that she was going to change
Davidson from an ordained minister to a free-lance reformer. Then she and
Joseph Schenck, United Artists’ president, bought the rights both to “Miss Thompson” and Rain under almost cloak-and-dagger levels of
secrecy, and once the deals were complete Swanson’s press office sent out a
quiet little release to the effect that Maugham’s “Miss Thompson” would be the
basis of her next film. “We never mentioned the words Sadie or Rain,” Swanson recalled, “but someone figured
it all out soon enough, because two days later headlines screamed that Gloria
Swanson was going to play Sadie Thompson in Rain, in defiance of the Hays Office ban.”
The
result was threatened lawsuits from the attorneys representing Maugham, Colton,
Randolph and Sam Harris, who had produced Rain on Broadway, as well as a ferociously
worded telegram from the heads of all the MPPDA member companies demanding that
Hays rescind his approval of Swanson’s project and ban the film. The two
signatures that most worried Swanson and Walsh were those of William Fox,
Walsh’s employer, and MGM founder Marcus Loew, since they wanted Lionel
Barrymore, an MGM contractee, to play the defrocked Davidson. Loew eventually
backtracked; “If Hays gave his consent, even though it were in error, I will
use my utmost endeavor to see he is backed up by the organization,” he wrote.
Even once she had the green light from both United Artists and Will Hays,
Swanson had further problems, including an acute attack of appendicitis that
laid her up just before shooting was to start (she went to a naturopath named
Dr. Henry Bieler, recovered and acquired an interest in alternative medicine
and health foods that lasted the rest of her life) and the loss of her chosen
cinematographer, George Barnes, who was summoned back by his contract employer, Sam Goldwyn, in the
middle of the shoot. Swanson replaced him first with Robert Kurrle, a nature
specialist who shot stunning exteriors of Catalina Island (“playing” the South
Seas, as usual in Hollywood films) but proved inadequate in the interior
scenes; then with Charles Rosher, Mary Pickford’s cameraman, who was fine but
whose clear, sharp, evenly lit work didn’t match Barnes’ proto-noir atmospherics; and finally with Oliver
Marsh, an MGM contractee assigned to the film by Marcus Loew, who rarely
interfered with MGM creatively but because he felt morally invested in the
project “gave orders to MGM to give me anyone I wanted,” Swanson wrote. Even
after the shoot was finished Swanson and Walsh had to fight the Hays Office
virtually every step of the way over the editing, with the result that the film
ran over schedule, over budget and wasn’t ready for release until early January
1928.
Seen today — and even missing the last reel (the film breaks off just as
Lionel Barrymore as Davidson is starting to register his temptation and lust) —
Sadie Thompson
emerges as one of the late masterpieces of the silent era, a brilliant,
uncompromising film in which our sympathies are kept throughout on the side of
Sadie: her love of life, her joie de vivre, her fearlessness and independence, and the way she’s
living her life by her own moral code even though it’s at the opposite pole
from that of the Davidsons. Gloria Swanson inhabits the role, turning herself
into a force of nature and giving an irrepressible performance that nails the various
moods of the character: joyous, free and impudent in the opening scenes as she
plays jazz records on her phonograph (a major prop in the stage version as
well) and the musical clashes become a metaphor for how much her freedom and
indifference (not conscious
rejection — she isn’t deliberately trying to be a “bad girl,” just living her
life according to the hand she’s been dealt and enjoying herself as much as she
possibly can) to his morality infuriates him. Lionel Barrymore is also
excellent, looking oddly younger than he had in James Young’s film The Bells a year earlier (though that’s probably
because he was wearing character makeup in that movie, itself one of the most
interesting late silents and historically significant because Boris Karloff
plays his first horror role in it) and contemplating Sadie’s extradition and
impending imprisonment with the same vicious, self-satisfied smirk with which
he rejoiced at the impending bankruptcy of James Stewart’s building-and-loan in
It’s a Wonderful Life
18 years later. The process by which he wears Sadie down and gets her to
“repent” — locking her in a room for three days and constantly praying with her
— bears an odd resemblance to the way drug addicts were detoxed then and for
years to come (it’s depicted in the 1956 film The Man with the Golden Arm and it’s the way John Coltrane got clean
and sober for real in 1957) — and perhaps the cruelest joke on the moralists in
this film is the glazed, almost zombie-like look Swanson as Sadie assumes after
she’s supposedly been “saved.” I suspect the real issue that bothered the real-life
Davidsons about this story wasn’t that Sadie was shown as a sinner but that her
life as a sinner was so much more fun and more satisfying than her life as a saint, and that at the
end she’s neither a prostitute nor a “good” girl but is heading for a new life
in a new country with a man who truly loves her.
Sadie Thompson was formally remade twice — having
bought the rights to the play Rain
Schenck produced a direct adaptation of it in 1932, with Lewis Milestone
directing and Joan Crawford and Walter Huston as stars (and my recollection is
that Crawford and Huston acted the parts well enough but didn’t become them in the intense way Swanson and
Barrymore did, and that there were other people around in 1932 who could have
played Sadie better — not only Barbara Stanwyck, who’d have been my first choice here as in so many other
movies, and who’d played a Sadie-like character in her breakthrough film Ladies
of Leisure, but also
Bette Davis and even Joan Blondell), and later Columbia picked up the rights
for a musical remake in 1953 with Rita Hayworth and José Ferrer (which I
haven’t seen and which is usually denounced as a simple-minded clean-up of the
original material). In addition it’s been referenced in many other movies,
including Vera-Ellen’s big dance number to Ann Ronell’s song “Willow, Weep for
Me” in the Marx Brothers’ last film, Love Happy. Sadie Thompson is also one of only two films I can
think of in which the producer and the director made love on-screen; Swanson
said she tested various young actors for O’Hara, including Douglas Fairbanks,
Jr. (who was only 18 at the time), but then realized “that the person I had
pictured in the role from the beginning was Raoul Walsh himself.” Walsh’s dual
career as an actor and director (he had worked for D. W. Griffith as a
directorial assistant and had played John Wilkes Booth in The Birth of a
Nation) ended abruptly
during the shooting of In Old Arizona, which was supposed to be his first talkie and in which he
was supposed to play the Cisco Kid as well as direct; alas, a charge in a prop
gun shot out one eye and he was replaced by Irving Cummings as director and
Warner Baxter as star, though once Walsh recovered he continued working as a director
until 1964 and lived until 1980. The only other film I can think of in which
the producer and director made love on screen was The Prince and the
Showgirl (1957), the
first (and ultimately the only) film made by Marilyn Monroe Productions, in
which she was the showgirl and Laurence Olivier was both the director and the
on-screen prince. — 11/4/14
[1] — Not true:
it happened again 30 years later in The Prince and the Showgirl (made in Great Britain but with an American star,
studio and financing), in which producer Marilyn Monroe made love on screen to
director Laurence Olivier. [M.G.C., 7/3/05]
[2] — The
imdb.com Web site gives a different explanation for Walsh’s injury: “Raoul
Walsh was cast as the Cisco Kid, as well as being the director; but during a return
drive to Los Angeles from Utah, a jackrabbit jumped through the windshield of
Walsh’s car, with both the rabbit and the broken glass hitting Walsh in the
face. (Safety glass was added to cars the following year.) The damage to
Walsh’s right eye necessitated replacing him in the lead role, re-writing the
script and re-shooting some scenes with a different director while Walsh
recuperated; Walsh thereafter wore the eye patch for which he was known, and
eventually lost the eye entirely. Some footage of Walsh, in chase scenes and
long shots, remains in the film.” [M.G.C., 7/3/05]
