The Yellow Ticket (Fox Film Corporation, 1931)

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

After As You Desire Me I ran another movie from the same era, also a romantic melodrama: The Yellow Ticket, a 1931 production from Fox Films before the 20th Century-Fox merger (though a 20th Century-Fox logo appeared on it, probably added in the 1950’s for a TV release), directed by Raoul Walsh and written by Jules Furthman and Guy Bolton from a play by Michael Morton. There were at least three previous films of the story, a 1918 German production, also called The Devil’s Pawn, starring Pola Negri; a 1918 U.S. remake with Fannie Ward, Milton Sills and Warner Oland, directed by William Parke; and a 1927 Russian version starring Anna Sten and directed by her then-husband Fyodor Ozep. The Yellow Ticket is set in Russia in 1913 and 1914, and a printed foreword at the beginning promises us a tale of Russian oppression under the Czars that the people rose up against in the 1917 revolution: “The throne of the Czars, the most powerful of modern times, was destroyed overnight by an oppressed and infuriated people. In the debris and ashes of that throne, history is slowly uncovering not only the relics of its triumphs and ambitions but also the evils which foreshadowed and hastened its fall.” It’s pretty amazing that in 1931, 14 years after the Bolshevik takeover and the establishment of the Soviet Union (and two years before the U.S. finally recognized the Soviet Union diplomatically), a U.S. studio could make a film that clearly and unmistakably states that the Russian Revolution was a good thing. It’s more depressing, of course, to realize that the sorts of oppression under the Czars detailed in this film – including political imprisonment, people executed and made to “disappear” without a trace, and internal passports restricting citizens’ movements – continued under the Soviets and, indeed, are still part and parcel of how Russia is governed today under Vladimir Putin.

After the foreword we hear the unmistakable voice of Lionel Barrymore – even though we don’t yet see him – issuing a new edict tightening the internal passport system and restricting Jews in particular to the so-called “Pale of Settlement,” essentially Russia’s ghetto (or reservation) where the Jews were more or less allowed to survive (barring occasional ride-by pogroms), and we see a band of Cossacks (probably people from Fox’s Western unit doing their usual thing – riding horses en masse and terrifying people – only this time in Cossack uniforms – just as the spectacular long shots, supposedly of Melvyn Douglas’s character, in As You Desire Me were undoubtedly doubled by a stunt rider from MGM’s Western unit) – and also posting the order from Baron Igor Andreeff (Lionel Barrymore) we heard dictating in the opening before we ever saw him. The central character is Marya Kalish (Elissa Landi), a Jewish schoolteacher in the Pale outside Kiev, Ukraine (now spelled “Kyiv,” for some reason), whose father has been arrested as a political prisoner and taken to St. Petersburg. Under Andreev’s new decree, she can’t leave the Pale to travel anywhere else in the Russian Empire, and after the typically inflexible bureaucrat turns down her application for a passport she runs into an obvious sex worker (the actress playing her isn’t listed on imdb.com but she makes an indelible impression), who informs her that she’s carrying a “yellow ticket” that denotes her as a legally registered prostitute. The up side of the “yellow ticket” is that she can go anywhere within Russia she likes; the down sides are that everyone will think she’s a real prostitute and she has to register with the police in whatever community she moves to every two months or she risks getting arrested and sentenced to 15 days in the local jail. Marya asks how she can get a yellow ticket and the woman sends her to her madam, Fania Rubenstein (Rita La Roy), , who writes her a yellow ticket and charges 50 rubles (the exact sum with which she earlier tried unsuccessfully to bribe the passport clerk into giving her a nrmal travel document).

Marya makes it to St. Petersburg and finds the prison camp where her father was being held, and after a lot of hemming and hawing over whether he’s actually their the jailers invite her to walk up a flight of stairs to his cell. He’s there, all right, but as we’ve already guessed he is dead, tortured and ultimately knocked off by his jailers. (This couldn't help but remind me of Vladimir Putin’s treatment of his perceived political enemies, particularly Alexei Navalny, who was posioned, fled to Germany to receive treatment he wasn’t allowed in Russia, then returned and was immediately imprisoned in an unknown location.) On a train she runs into a British journalist, Julian Rolfe (Laurence Olivier, young and callow-looking in only his third feature film: Fox’s casting department obviously saw him as another Ronald Colman, and outfitted him with the same pencil-thin moustache, high voice and a manner veering between the imperious and the flippant) who spares her from a pushy Greek and other male passengers who assume her yellow ticket will immediately admit them to her sex organs. The two ride together and Rolfe, whose previous articles and dispatches from Russia have been what his government “minders” wanted him to write, is fascinated with Marya’s tales of the real repression of the Russian regime, including the internal passport system, the yellow tickets and the persecution of the Jews. Rplfe’s articles cause such a sensation abroad the Russian regime – particularly Andreev and his nephew and assistant, Count Nikolai (Walter Byron, Gloria Swanson’s leading man in the unfinished Queen Kelly, which Erich von Stroheim wrote and directed for her until its producer, Joseph P. Kennedy – yes, the father of those Kennedys – pulled the plug) – they debate what they can do to stop him.

Their first thought is to arrest him and put him on trial, but that might offend the British government, especially when Russia is counting on Britain being an ally in the upcoming war. So they concentrate on identifying his source, and he’s been seen with Marya around town enough that it’s not hard to figure out who’s feeding him all this negative information. Meanwhile, Andreev has determined to have his own wicked way with Marya, and after he gives her a card telling her that if anyone else ever hassles her she can present it and they will stop on his order, she ends up using it to fend off Nikolai’s advances. Andreev shows her to his room in the palace, including the display case where he keeps a collection of various weapons that have been used in previous attempts to assassinate him, which range from icepicks and daggers to various guns. He shows Marya one in particular but claims he wears a steel corset to protect himself against anyone who tries to shoot him. This sets up a scene I suspect Michael Morton was ripping off from Tosca – both Victorien Sardou’s French play and Puccini’s Italian opera based on it – as Andreev toys with Marya while she grabs the gun. Loads it with whatever bullets from Andreev’s display case will fit it, and conceals it inside her coat as Andreev shows her around his rooms and throws subtle but unmistakable hints as to what he really wants from her – especially when he catches on that Marya is really not a prostitute but a virgin who, though she carries the yellow ticket, has never actually turned a trick. (Almost 60 years later writer J. F. Lawton pulled the same trick with Julia Roberts’ character in Pretty Woman, having her show up at Richard Gere’s hotel room ostensibly to have sex with him for money when she’s never done anything like that before.)

Andreev even references the Biblical story of Judith and her murder of the enemy general Holofernes – she got access to him by offering herself sexually and then literally cut off his head – so he has at least some awareness of what he’s up against. But she nonetheless is able to kill him anyway, shooting at his torso which turns out not to be steel-clad after all, and she seeks out Rolfe after having learned from Andreev and Nikolai that their plan for Rolfe was to kidnap him and send him to a work gang in Siberia. Then a deus ex machina arrives in the form of World War I: as the Russian troops mobilize for the front and chaos and confusion reign in the streets of St. Petersburg, Rolfe takes Marya to the British embassy in St. Petersburg and gets them both asylum. The ending is an astonishing premonition of Casablanca 11 years later – a shot of a plane (a rather elaborate airliner that existed in 1931 but not likely in 1914!) about to take off and fly the two lovebirds to Britain, where in a final gesture Marya takes out her yellow ticket and tears it up, throwing it out the plane’s window in mid-air. (Planes flew so low then they didn’t require pressurized cabins, so they could still have openable windows.)

The Yellow Ticket is an astonishing movie, vividly directed by Walsh – like George Fitzmaurice in As You Desire Me, Walsh had the task of taking a film based on a stage play and really making it work on film. While Fitzmaurice and cinematographer William Daniels did so by throwing a series of dazzling, painterly images on screen, Walsh and his cinematographer, the great James Wong Howe, made The Yellow Ticket come to cinematic life by keeping the camera in almost constant motion. The film is also marked by powerful suspense editing and an unusually extensive musical score by Carli Elinor, with uncredited contributions (probably stock music from Fox’s library) by Hugo Friedhofer and R. H. Bassett. At a time in film history in which background scoring was considered a passé holdover from the silent-film era, The Yellow Ticket is one of the earliest sound films that uses a nearly continuous score not only to heighten the emotions but emphasize the action in the closely synchronized way that ultimately became known as “Mickey-Mousing.” (The term came from Walt Disney’s conviction that audiences would accept a sound cartoon only if the various elements – the images, the characters’ speaking voices and the music – were all kept in very close synchronization.) With Howe’s almost vertiginous camera movements, Elinor’s wall-to-wall music and Walsh’s naturalistic staging of dialogue scenes, The Yellow Ticket looks far more like a film from 1939 than 1931 – and the acting is for the most part marvelously understated (even Lionel Barrymore, a great scenery-chewer under other, more complaisant directors, must have been read the riot act by Walsh, because his performance is quiet, understated and therefore a lot more sinister than some of his other villains; later in 1932 he would have another go at the end of Czarism in Russia when he played Rasputin in MGM’s Rasputin and the Empress, with his brother John as the prince who plots Rasputin’s assassination and sister Ethel as Czarina Alexandra),

About the only cast member who seems a bit at sea with the demands of movie acting is Olivier, who was then doing his first stint in Hollywood with his first wife, actress Jill Esmond – who was attracitng more interest from producers than he was. Later the Oliviers moved back to Britain and Esmond broke up with him and became a Lesbian, living with a female partner for decades while paving the way for Olivier to marry his second wife, Vivien Leigh. Olivier made films pretty steadily from 1931 to 1989, when he made a film by Derek Jarman based on Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem (itself based on Wolfred Owen’s poems about World War I) and, just before his death, he filmed a hologram as “Akash, the Ultimate Word in Truth” in Dave Clark’s rock musical Time, and since he recorded his part as a hologram he was able to continue starring in that play even after he died in 1989. But for the most part he wrote off his 1930’s films, saying that until he was directed by William Wyler in the 1939 version of Wuthering Heights he hadn’t yet realized that acting for film had to be done considerably less overtly and more subtly than acting on the stage.