The Way to Love (Paramount, 1933)

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

Last night my husband Charles and I watched a couple of grey-label DVD’s of two films starring Maurice Chevalier in the early 1930’s, in his fabulously successful stint in Hollywood from 1929 to 1935 that ended abruptly when his then-wife, French singer Mistinguett, told him she wanted to move back home because she was tired of living anywhere else but in France. (She was a huge star in Paris but nobody had heard of her here, which may have been why she wanted to go home.) I had grown up with Maurice Chevalier as the avuncular old philosophe he had played in the 1958 film Gigi and innumerable TV appearances and records on MGM – and I hadn’t realized he had ever been young until one day when I was watching the original Jeopardy! (with Art Fleming as host – not many people know there was a Jeopardy! host before Alex Trebek) and that day’s Final Jeopardy clue was, “The biggest sex symbol in movies between Rudolph Valentino and Clark Gable.” The right answer – at least according to the show’s clue team – was, “Who was Maurice Chevalier?” I heard that years before I actually ever saw a film with the young Chevalier, and when I finally did I was a bit perplexed because he didn’t seem all that sexy (it’s likely that many film buffs in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, asked who was the biggest male sex symbol in the movies since Valentino, would have said Ronald Colman), but he was certainly energetic and had already perfected his boulevardier act.

Chevalier was actually a working-class kid from one of the slummier districts of Paris, but he learned to play the aristocrat to perfection and a lot of his movies – including his masterpiece, Rouben Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight (1932) – play off the contrast between his proletarian origins and his aristocratic image. The first Chevalier film we watched last night was The Way to Love, a 1933 Paramount vehicle directed by Norman Taurog from a committee-written script (Gene Fowler and Benjamin Glazer, screenplay; and Claude Binyon and Frank Butler, additional dialogue) that begins with a slice-of-city-life montage obviously influenced by the similar opening of Love Me Tonight: a number of Paris residents sing a witty song by Ralph Rainger and Leo Robin about the differences between what they are and what they want to be. Chevalier plays François, and at our first glimpse of him he’s carrying a sandwich board advertising the services of his employer, Prof. Gaston Bibi (Edward Everett Horton, not quite as foofy as usual). Bibi runs a combination photo studio and tanning salon whose market niche is faking photographs and suntans for people who want to claim they were out of town when they were really fooling around with people other than their lawfully wedded spouses. One woman is left too long under the sunlamp and she ends up with its warning sign, “Handle With Care,” stenciled on her back. An obviously inebriated man, confronted with a backdrop of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, tries to lean along with the tower and then asks that the backdrop be straightened so it doesn’t look crooked.

Bibi is the center of a Bohemian colony that also includes Joe (Arthur Pierson), an American and an aspiring composer whom we hear across the way aimlessly noodling on his piano; Annette (Nydia Westman, who lived from 1902 to 1970 and worked as a character actress almost until the end), a young woman who freaks out every time anyone uses the word “marriage” or any of its derivatives; her aunt Suzanne (Minna Gombell), who’s trying to M-word her off to François; and a few other people it was hard to keep track of. François’s great ambition is to be a tour guide for the company owned by Monsieur Priat (silent-film comedian Billy Bevan) – early on he upbraids one of Priat’s existing guides for failing to include the romance of Paris in his spiel – and ultimately he gets his wish and goes through a ridiculous orientation ceremony that sounds more like taking an oath of office than starting a gig in the private sector. François also rescues the film’s heroine, Madeleine (Ann Dvorak), who’s under the legal guardianship of a circus knife-thrower, Marco (character villain John Miljan), who forces her to be the target in his act and mistreats (and presumably physically abuses) her off-stage. I suspect the writing committee borrowed this plot gimmick from Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus (1928), and it was odd to be watching this movie just after having seen Chaplin’s Limelight, another film that cast its hero as the savior of an abused or wounded woman whom he moves into his room despite the stares and shocked reactions of those around him, who assume hanky-panky is going on.

The Way to Love starts quite promisingly but it pretty soon drifts off into movie conventions, and just as we’re all too aware of the gap in imagination between Rouben Mamoulian and Norman Taurog as directors, we’re also all too conscious of the gap between the writing committee’s members and the brilliant Samuel Hoffenstein, Mamoulian’s writer on Love Me Tonight. Charles noted that this film occupies a peculiar niche in the history of the Motion Picture Production Code, since it was made in the more raffish, more sexually honest period of lax Code enforcement from 1930 to 1934 (usually, but inaccurately, referred to by film historians as “pre-Code”) and the tighter standards imposed by the Code Administration under the lash of the Legion of Decency, a Roman Catholic pressure organization created to “improve” the morals of movies in general (and end the film career of Mae West in particular) in 1934. Charles noted that Chevalier is behaving as a relatively innocent “post-Code” character (itself a bit of anti-type casting since 1933 audiences would have expected to see Chevalier as a morals-pushing roué) living a raffish “pre-Code” situation and wondering why anybody is questioning his decency or chastity. The Way to Love ends pretty much as you’d expect it to, with François getting both the girl and his dream job as a tour guide, though there’s the payoff of a running gag towards the end in which a character who’s been cutting off people’s neckties just under the knot does that to François just as he’s in full Priat-guide drag. It was a fun movie for what it was but it’s not exactly one of the great landmarks of Chevalier’s career.