The Impatient Maiden (Universal; 1932)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I’d planned a long night of movie-watching including the next two items in sequence on our run-through of the James Whale oeuvre and a film being shown on Turner Classic Movies’ “Noir Alley,” the fascinating 1964 remake of The Killers. The next film in the Whale canon – and his first after the smash success of Frankenstein – was an oddball item called The Impatient Maiden, based on a 1931 book by Donald Henderson Clarke which Carl Laemmle, Jr. (who’d been put in charge of Universal by his father in 1930 when he was just 20 years old) bought while it was still in galley proofs and hadn’t been officially published. Clarke’s novel was called The Impatient Virgin and dealt with a young woman who had decided that the personal, professional and especially sexual limitations put on the female sex by the mores of the time weren’t for her. Laemmle originally bought the book as a vehicle for Clara Bow, the 1920’s flapper star whom he hoped to borrow from her home studio, Paramount. Then the project collapsed: first Bow decided she didn’t like the story and wouldn’t do it unless the script were completely rewritten to her specifications. Then Bow got embroiled in a scandal that began when she caught her personal assistant, Daisy DeVoe, embezzling from her and fired her. DeVoe filed an unlawful-termination lawsuit and alleged during it that Bow was a nymphomaniac who had had various sexual adventures, including taking on the entire UCLA football team in one night. DeVoe ultimately lost her lawsuit but the lies she made about Bow stuck – and are still being repeated as “truth” by otherwise sober, responsible historians of Hollywood.

Paramount fired Bow, but given that scandal cuts both ways in the entertainment industry a number of other studios got interested in Bow, including MGM (who wanted her for Red-Headed Woman, which ultimately became the star-making vehicle for Jean Harlow even though Harlow had to darken her hair for the role, whereas Bow really was a redhead) and RKO (who wanted her for What Price Hollywood?, the beta version of A Star Is Born, which eventually got made with Constance Bennett). Eventually in 1932 Bow signed with Fox because she had just married Western actor Rex Bell; he had a ranch in Nevada which he needed money to save, and while the other studios interested in her wanted her to sign long-term contracts Fox was willing to hire her for just two films, and she figured with the money from them she could save her husband’s ranch and retire, which she did. (The first of Bow’s two Fox films, Call Her Savage, surfaced a decade or so ago on TCM and turned out to be a masterpiece, one of the best films to come out of Hollywood’s relative period of sexual freedom on screen between 1930 and 1934, thanks to John Francis Dillon’s knowing direction and a superb, rangy performance by Bow which showed she could do far more than the rather limited good-time girls she’d played at Paramount.)

That relative period of freedom is often – erroneously – referred to in film histories as the “pre-Code” era because it came before the draconian level of enforcement the Motion Picture Production Code Administration imposed after the Legion of Decency, a lobbying organization founded by the Roman Catholic Church, came down on the film business in 1934 – but anyone who thinks the 1930-34 period was truly “pre-Code” is in for a rude awakening if they read the account James Curtis tells of the making of The Impatient Maiden in his biography of James Whale, A New World of Gods and Monsters. No sooner had Carl Laemmle, Jr. closed on the rights to The Impatient Virgin and sent the novel off to the Production Code Administration for review than he got back a scathing letter to the effect that under no circumstances would they approve such a sex-driven story for film. Laemmle countered with a letter which essentially said that under his treatment, the film would be a stern morality tale against any woman who attempted any degree of independence or any adult life other than that of a wife and mother: “The whole philosophy of the picture will be that a girl who tries to buck the social conventions, to live her own life, have a career, is foredoomed to unhappiness and futility, which she finally recognizes after bitter experience and ends up marrying the boy whom she really loves and wants to marry her after she realizes the silliness and stupidity of fighting her own lover for the sake of a modern and false idea.” Eventually after several script rewrites, a title change (the “V-word” remained so verboten under the Production Code that as late as 1953 Otto Preminger’s film The Moon Is Blue was denied a Code Seal of Approval because its dialogue contained the words “virgin” and “pregnant”) and at least three directors, including William Wyler and Cyril Gardner, The Impatient Maiden finally went before the cameras in early 1932 with Whale directing a script by Richard Schayer and Winifred Dunn.

Most Whale fans dismiss The Impatient Maiden as a studio assignment he had little to do with and which wasn’t very interesting, but it turned out to be a better film than its history would lead one to believe – even though there were better movies around the same time that dealt with the same issues raised by a woman using her sexuality to get ahead, including MGM’s The Easiest Way and the film Clara Bow had the good sense to make instead, Call Her Savage. The Impatient Maiden begins as almost a parody of Waterloo Bridge, with the same female star, Mae Clarke, playing Ruth Robbins (her name had been “Rollins” in the book), a career woman who works as the secretary to a divorce lawyer, Albert Hartman (John Halliday). She’s acquired a cynical view of marriage from listening to all the formerly loving spouses heatedly denounce each other in Hartman’s office while she’s had to take notes of their diatribes against each other. She also has a marriage-minded roommate named Betty Merrick (Una Merkel, playing her usual comic ditz after her surprisingly serious and moving turn as Ann Rutledge in D. W. Griffith’s 1930 biopic Abraham Lincoln).

The plot kicks off when a woman who lives in the same building as Ruth and Betty attempts to commit suicide by gas after she gets pregnant and her husband responds by leaving her. Ruth and Betty call the authorities and they send out a young doctor who’s still doing his residency, Myron Brown (Lew Ayres), and a male nurse who works with him, Clarence Howe (Andy Devine). Today they’d be called EMT’s (Emergency Medical Technicians). They come out in an ambulance whose windshield has the word “AMBULANCE” on it in normal lettering (in other early-1930’s movies we’ve seen ambulances with the word printed in mirror image so it would read correctly when a driver in front of it saw it in his rear-view mirror) and they make a bet with each other for 50¢ over whether they’ll be able to save her life with the emergency ventilator they brought with them. (This part of the movie sounds all too relevant today!) Ruth takes an interest in Myron but he explains he can’t marry her for at least two years; first he has to complete his residency and then it will take him at least a year to set up enough of a practice to support a wife. Betty falls head over heels for Clarence and couldn’t care less whether he can support her or not, though he’s convinced the new zippered straitjacket he’s invented will make him and Dr. Brown (who’s put what little money he has into it) enough to marry and support their girlfriends.

In what was the one shard of sexual content left over from the original novel by the time the platoons of screenwriters had got through chopping, channeling and making it acceptable to the Code authorities, Ruth’s employer Albert Hartman shows her a beautiful and lavish Art Deco apartment and says that it can be hers if only she … and, horrified, Ruth not only turns down Albert’s offer to “keep” her as a mistress but walks out on her legitimate job with him too. (Once again, in the age of #MeToo, this part of The Impatient Maiden seems all too relevant now.) Broke, Ruth visits an employment agency but is told they can’t place her without a reference from her previous employer. She starts feeling run-down and barely makes it home (she and Betty live in a building on top of Los Angeles’s legendary Angel’s Flight two-block railway, whose cars are slanted to match the acute inline they cover; the Angel’s Flight was a common sight in late-1940’s movies, especially films noir, but it was a surprise to see it in a movie this early and with no noir elements, though one could well imagine James Whale being a great noir director if he’d kept his career going long enough) when suddenly we realize that Schayer and Dunn are holding to Anton Chekhov’s dictum to aspiring playwrights that if you introduce a pistol in act one, you have to have it go off in act three.

Only in this movie the “pistol” is Ruth Robbins’ appendix; when she and Dr. Brown first met he felt her abdomen and warned her her appendix was about to rupture, and it duly does so in the last reels, forcing Betty to call an ambulance and take her to the hospital – where Dr. Brown is forced to operate on her alone since there’s been a multi-car collision and all the other E.R. doctors there are working to save the lives of its victims. So a film that started out more as a screwball comedy than anything else and then veered into romantic melodrama ends up as The Magnificent Obsession three years early: the good doctor has to save the life of his girlfriend and in the process win her back to being his girlfriend, and in the finale Dr. Brown writes a note to her on his prescription pad prescribing love, marriage and children – expressing the moral lesson Junior Laemmle promised the Production Code Administration that any woman who deviates from the fate of love, marriage and motherhood God (or at least the PCA’s version of God) hath decreed for her is going to suffer ruination, damnation, unemployment and even appendicitis. Ironically, the writers had done such a good job of purging the story out of anything racy that the only trouble it had with state censor boards (who were often even stricter than the PCA) came from the medical porn at the end, in which Whale depicted the operation with a surprising degree of depth (and gave Lew Ayres a warm-up for his recurring role as Dr. Kildare in an MGM film series in the late 1930’s). Whale had a friend named Dr. Stanley Immerman, whom he gave bit parts to in several of his movies and also used as a technical advisor when he needed help with a medical scene – and according to Curtis, a year after he advised Whale and Ayres on how to depict Mae Clarke undergoing a fictional appendectomy, he removed her appendix for real.

The Impatient Maiden comes off as actually a reasonably good film, and though it wasn’t a personal project Whale clearly liked its frequent changes of genre and managed them quite well. He also got a nicely edgy performance from Lew Ayres even though he and Whale didn’t get along and Ayres complained to Curtis that Whale never gave him any indication after a take of whether or not he thought it was any good. The Impatient Maiden is hardly a great film by any means (and as I noted above quite a few other movies of the 1930-34 period dealt with these situations and moral issues more honestly and dramatically), but it’s a good deal better than its reputation and once again it makes me wish Whale had cast Lew Ayres instead of the wooden Kent Douglass in Waterloo Bridge. One can see why Whale fans are disappointed in it, especially given its position in his canon between two highly personal films that are acknowledged masterpieces, Frankenstein and The Old Dark House, but as a stage director Whale had handled a wide variety of projects and he didn’t see why his film career should be any different. Whale would go on to make a superb mystery thriller, The Kiss Before the Mirror (a “Hitchcock” film well before Alfred Hitchcock had developed his style to the level of Whale’s work); one of the greatest screwball comedies of all time, Remember Last Night? (an unjustly neglected film that ramped up both the drinking and the overall devil-may-care irresponsibility of The Thin Man, its obvious model, well past what MGM ever dared!); and one of the great musicals, the 1936 Show Boat. Whale is obviously best known for his horror films, but he could do a lot more than that!