Waterloo Bridge (Universal, 1931)

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

One good piece of news yesterday was that the copy I’d ordered from amazon.com of James Whale’s second film, Waterloo Bridge, had finally arrived and so I was able to start my planned go-through of all Whale’s movies in chronological order, slotting his famous horror films – Frankenstein, The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man and The Bride of Frankenstein – where they fit amongst his other movies instead of keeping them separate. It also gave me an excuse to open the Blu-Ray box of all Universal’s classic “series” monster films from the 1930’s and 1940’s and start running them (I’d earlier collected them on DVD but at a time when Universal’s quality control was going through a problem, so the discs had a lot of glitches and rather than replace the glitchy ones piecemeal I decided to grab the Blu-Ray box because it was on an excellent sale price around Hallowe’en 2019). James Whale’s second film (or third, if you count his co-director credit on Howard Hughes’ Hell’s Angels) was Waterloo Bridge, a 1931 Universal production (Whale’s first for that company) based on a play by Robert E. Sherwood set in London in the early years of World War I, in which an American soldier on leave in London (the U.S. hadn’t entered the war yet but his involvement in it is due to the fact that after his father died, his mom married a British citizen and the son enlisted while in England to see his family) falls in love and has a doomed affair with a young woman who turned to prostitution after jobs as a chorus dancer dried up due to the war.

Charles and I had seen this version of Waterloo Bridge once before on a VHS I recorded from Turner Classic Movies, and my impression then had been that it was a potentially great film, superbly atmospheric and with excellent players in the supporting roles, undone by a surprisingly weak pair of leads: Mae Clarke as the heroine, Myra Deauville (the latter, she explains, is just a stage name) and a multi-named actor originally named Robert Douglass Montgomery but billed here as “Kent Douglass” as the soldier Roy Cronin who meets her while London is being bombed by Zeppelins in the early part of the war. (Later the Germans built a long-range bombing plane called the Gotha and used that to bomb London; Charles had a hard time wrapping his head around the fact that Britain had been bombed during the First World War.) I came to Waterloo Bridge this time around prepared to be more kindly disposed to Mae Clarke after having read in James Curtis’s biography of Whale, A New World of Gods and Monsters, how carefully he worked with her to explore the part and the character’s tangled emotions. At the same time, according to Curtis’s account, he pretty much gave up on Kent Douglass, realizing that all he’d ever be is a nice-looking leading man but one unable to sound any particular character depths.

What makes the might-have-beens around Waterloo Bridge even more heartbreaking is that buried in the cast list as Roy Cronin’s sister, billed sixth and shown more often with her back to the camera than facing it, was a young actress named Bette Davis who, as she told her later biographer Whitney Stine, “yearned all through shooting to play Myra – I could have!” Indeed she could have, and had Whale cast Davis as Myra and Universal’s hottest leading man, Lew Ayres, as Roy he could have had a masterpiece and Davis might have ended up becoming a star and making millions of dollars for Universal instead of leaving the studio after her option ran out and ultimately becoming a star and making millions of dollars for Warner Bros. (It’s interesting that when I looked up the 1931 Waterloo Bridge on imdb.com, the “others like this” that came up were all other early Bette Davis credits: Bad Sister at Universal, Way Back Home at RKO on a loanout from Universal, and Three On a Match, The Dark Horse, The Working Man and So Big at Warners.) Seeing it now I was better able to appreciate the film Waterloo Bridge for what it is instead of wishing for what it might have been with a stronger pair of leads – though there’s an intriguing scene in which Bette Davis is lurking above Mae Clarke on a staircase, and I imagined she was thinking, “Some day I’m going to be where she is!”

The film, reflecting its stage origins (Benn W. Levy, one of Whale’s favorite writers, and Tom Reed did the adaptation), is in three acts: the first is the meet-cute between Myra and Roy as they both help an old potato seller (Rita Carlisle) pick up her wares after she’s dropped them in the middle of a German air raid and their subsequent tense meeting at her apartment where she owes four pounds sixpence in back rent and he offers to pay it but she’s morally torn as to whether or not to accept. The second takes place at the country home of Roy’s family, with his stepfather Major Wetherby (Frederick Kerr, the other person besides Clarke to be in both Waterloo Bridge and Frankenstein), his mother (Enid Bennett), and his sister Janet (Bette Davis). He’s brought Myra there to see if his family will accept her as his wife, but the visit goes so wretchedly and she feels so out of place that she high-tails it back to London and her old existence. The third act shows her back at her old apartment, still being hounded by her landlady (the marvelous character actress Ethel Griffies) for back rent, and at one point she picks up another servicemember who offers to pay her for a night together, but she turns her back on him, then changes his mind but only after he’s gone away in a cab, obviously in search of someone with fewer moral scruples.

Out of place in her old existence and also convinced that there’s no permanent place for her in Roy’s life, she reacts when he turns up and tells her that he’s being shipped off to the front in a few hours but he still wants to marry her in the brief time he has available before he has to go back to the war. She angrily turns him down and leaves behind a note saying that it’s best this way. Roy asks the landlady rather frantically just where she might have been likely to go, and she says, “Waterloo Bridge” – where, of course, Roy and Myra had met in the first place. He goes there and just as he sees her the truck that’s supposed to pick him and the other members of his unit up to drive them to the train that will take them to Dover to be shipped back to France arrives, and he once again reiterates his proposal. They frantically kiss – the only physical contact we’ve seen between these two doomed lovers all movie – and she accepts his proposal, but we’re not sure whether that’s because she really wants to or only to get him to leave so he doesn’t miss his troop train and get himself court-martialed. Roy gets on the truck, and just as it’s pulling away Whale and his cinematographer, Arthur Edeson, use the super-camera crane Universal had built two years earlier for the 1929 musical Broadway to pull us away from the action and give us a surprisingly clinical view as Myra is literally blown up in a direct hit on Waterloo Bridge by a German bomb. (Seeing this shortly after Whale’s previous film, Journey’s End – which also ends with the principals dying from an enemy bomb – I was struck not only by the similarity but the irony that the Germans missed the troop truck, whose destruction will be at least of some help to their war effort, and took out a civilian who was no help to them at all except as part of the terror campaign at the root of the decision to do air attacks on cities and their civilian populations.)

Waterloo Bridge is a success on almost every level – even Mae Clarke, whom I’ve come down hard on before (at least partly because the only two films of hers that circulate much today are The Public Enemy, where she’s the recipient of the grapefruit James Cagney shoves in her face, and Frankenstein, where she’s little more than the usual damsel-in-distress in a horror film), seems excellent in portraying the character’s tumbled emotions and in particular her self-loathing that causes her to turn down true love even when it’s offered to her. The film’s one failure – and a surprising one, given that the director had previously done Journey’s End on both stage and screen – is that Kent Douglass utterly fails to dramatize the effect serving in the World War I trenches generally had on the people who had to do it. He’s an empty-headed good-looking man who doesn’t seem to have been affected at all by the war, and this time around I wondered what this movie might have been if Whale had been able to get his Journey’s End star, Colin Clive, to play the lead. Clive would later prove he could play effectively in romantic films like Dorothy Arzner’s Christopher Strong (1933) – a soap opera story given surprising weight and power by the anti-type casting of Clive and the film’s female lead, Katharine Hepburn – and Frank Borzage’s History Is Made at Night (1937), though in both those movies he was a driven, neurotic romantic lead instead of an ordinary one.

Having both leads be among the walking wounded – he suffering from PTSD due to the war and she from her moral traumas about how she was making her living – would have made Waterloo Bridge an even more interesting story than it is, but even so it’s a quite remarkable movie and a worthy competitor to MGM’s remake from 1940, which had a far stronger female lead (Vivien Leigh – she had just made Gone With the Wind and the Hollywood Xerox machine was going full bore: “Hey, she just had a hit with a doomed romance set against the backdrop of a major war. Let’s give her another doomed romance set against the backdrop of a major war!”), a moderately stronger male lead (Robert Taylor, cast after Leigh vetoed the studio’s first choice, Clark Gable, because she’d grown to hate him while making Gone With the Wind), superb direction by Mervyn LeRoy and, inevitably, a much more romantic gloss over the story in which Myra’s involvement in the world’s oldest profession had to be even more “fudged” than it is here.