Madam Satan (MGM, 1930)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I put on the DVD of Cecil B. DeMille’s 1930 film Madam Satan, his second of three films for MGM. At the time DeMille was going through a bad patch of his career; having been present (and, indeed, instrumental) at the creation of one major studio, Paramount, in 1914 (actually the Jesse L. Lasky Company, which merged with Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players to form Paramount), he thought he could do it again. So in 1925 DeMille organized a company called Producers’ Distributing Corporation (PDC, certainly not to be confused with the 1940’s “B”: studio PRC, for Producers’ Releasing Corporation) and made his first PDC film, The Volga Boatmen, Unfortunately, it was a commercial disappointment and, without his knowledge or approval, his financial backers sold the company to Pathé, which was already in the throes of decline. DeMille’s next film, The King of Kings (1927), a gloriously over-the-top biopic of Jesus Christ (and DeMille’s estate was so lavish he was able to use his backyard garden to “play” Gethsemane), was a huge hit. He followed it up with The Godless Girl (1928), a parable about religious belief and disbelief which took the interesting tack that the titular character rebels against her upbringing in a church based on fear and retribution, then turns around and becomes a believer when she’s presented with a vision of God as love. Alas, DeMille made this movie at the cusp of the silent-to-sound transition, and the bosses at Pathé took it away from him and hired Fritz Feld – usually a comic character actor best known as the crazy psychiatrist in Howard Hawks’ comedy masterpiece Bringing Up Baby (1938) and as the real Anatole of Paris, whom Danny Kaye impersonates, in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947) – to direct additional sound sequences. (Ironically, that version of the film is lost today but DeMille kept a personal print of the silent version, which survives.)

DeMille understandably was disgusted at the way the “suits” at Pathé had treated him, so in 1929 he signed with MGM for a three-picture contract. His first film, Dynamite (1929), was one of those reverse-Cinderella tales oddly common in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s in which a spoiled heiress falls for a proletarian type and ultimately has to descend the social ladder and learn to live on his income. It did O.K. at the box office, and so DeMille was allowed to make a bizarre big-budgeted musical (the only one of his career) called Madam Satan. The first hour or so is a pretty typical drawing-room tale of unfaithful husbands and long-suffering wives: Bob Brooks (Reginald Denny, oddly cast as a romantic lead in a part that cries out for Cary Grant or Errol Flynn, neither of whom were making feature films yet) and his best friend, Jimmy Wade (Roland Young) have been out all night and come back to the Brooks home quite a bit the worse for wear. Wade is single but Brooks is married to Angela (Kay Johnson, top-billed; critic Leonard Maltin lamented that the best thing Hollywood could think of doing with this remarkably beautiful, poised and talented actress was to have her play silly upper-class heroines for DeMille’’s morality plays; she gave up her career to concentrate on being the wife of director John Cromwell, though they divorced in 1946, and actor James Cromwell, best known for playing the lead human role of Farmer Hoggett in the film Babe, is their son).

The two try to sneak quietly into the Brooks’s home – where in a welrdly homoerotic scene they end up sleeping together, albeit in the obligatory twin beds – but not only are they too drunk to avoid making noise, they’ve already been “outed” by a front-page story in the morning newspaper announcing that socialites Bob Brooks and Jimmy Wade appeared in night court at 2 a.m. along with “Mrs. Brooks.” Naturally Angela wants to know who this other “Mrs. Brooks” was, especially since she knows it couldn’t have been her – she went to bed at 10 p.m. – and it turns out to be Trixie (Lillian Roth, who apparently caused so much trouble on the set of this movie that as punishment MGM loaned her to Paramount and sent her to make Animal Crackers with the Marx Brothers). There’s a bizarre and oddly slow-moving scene in Trixie’s apartment in which Bob and Jimmy have gone – Bob has tried to pass off Trixie as Jimmy’s wife – and Angela crashes Trixie’s apartment intending to tell her to leave Bob alone if she knows what’s good for her. Unfortunately Trixie has left and Angela ends up in Trixie’s bed with blankets entirely covering her and Jimmy lying on bed on top of her, so Bob thinks Jimmy has a secret girlfriend and is unaware that it’s his own wife. This reads like the stuff of French bedroom farce, except it’s carefully not played for laughs and at the same time it’s not really drama either, Angela does get a chance to confront Trixie and tell her that if her husband wants a “bad” woman, she’ll play bad and make him so sick of vice he’ll return to her and virtue.

Angela sees her opportunity when Jimmy decides to host a wild costume party aboard a dirigible – I’m not making this up, you know! – and disguises herself as a French vamp called “Madam Satan,” and in one of the worst phony “French” accents of all time she calls out to all the guests at Jimmy’s party, “Would you like to go to hell with Madam Satan?” (Fortunately this was made during the period of loose enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code; after the Code was tightened in 1934 its enforcement arm, the Hays Office, decreed that this story premise was permissible only if the erring husband knew all along that the mystery woman vamping him was really his wife.) The party scenes are easily the best parts of the film, featuring a character billed as “Electricity” (Theodore Kosloff), who leads an elaborate dance sequence in the then-current style of Ballet Mécanique, which was originally filmed in two-strip Technicolor but, alas, no color print is known to exist. There are also characters at the party called “Miss Conning Tower” (Julianne Johnston) and “Call of the Wild” (Vera Marsh), as well as an ensemble introduced as “Mr. and Mrs. Henry VIII” – a man and six women. (Even the real Henry VIII didn’t try to be married to more than one woman at a time.) Trixie comes to the party as “Miss Golden Pheasant” and wants Bob to bid for her at the auction that will climax the party and make her the belle of the ball if she fetches the highest price (the winner of the auction gets a dance with the woman he bids for), but she’s royally upset when the upstart “Madam Satan” enters the party and Bob starts bidding for her instead.

Just then a storm starts outside in what passes for divine retribution in a Cecil B. DeMille movie set in the present day, and the dirigible’s captain (Boyd Irwin) tells Jimmy he should evacuate his guests while there’s still time. Jimmy, of course, ignores him, and what follows is a turbulent (literally and figuratively) scene in which the party-goers scramble for parachutes and the harnesses they need to be able to use them. There are some interesting gags about where the parachuting party-goers end up – including one where a woman crashes through the roof of a men’s bathhouse just as the guys are talking about how wonderful it is to get away from women. (My husband Charles joked that this may be the earliest screen depiction of a Gay bathhouse.) The only guest who doesn’t get to parachute to safety is Bob Brooks, and he’s able to survive – albeit with a broken hand – by diving out of the wreckage of the dirigible into Central Park Lake. Of course Bob and Angela are united at the end. Madam Satan is one of those oddly schizoid movies in which the first and second halves have little or nothing to do with each other, and the second (the party) and third (the retribution) are both a lot more fun than the rather pachydermous exposition in act one that sets up the situation. Both Charles and I noted the visual similarities between Madam Satan and Just Imagine, the futuristic musical Fox made in 1930 with Buddy DeSylva, Lew Brown and Ray Henderson as producers, and though Just Imagine was supposed to take place 50 years in the future (i.e., 1980) while Madam Satan was set in the present, the set designs in particular are very similar – so much so that Charles joked he felt like El Brendel, the Swedish dialect comedian who was the star of Just Imagine, was going to walk into Madam Satan at any moment.

The original ads for Madam Satan promised, “You’ve never seen anything like it before!,” and as with some other big-budgeted musicals of 1930 (including the stunning masterpiece King of Jazz) the Depression-driven box office had passed it by. Audiences of 1930 were far more interested in gangster stories – the biggest film of the year in terms of box-office receipts was Little Caesar – than elaborate musicals, especially elaborate musicals about people with too much money for their own good. DeMille’s next and last MGM film was The Squaw Man, a story he’d already filmed twice before (in 1914 and 1918 – the 1914 version was the first feature-length film ever made in Hollywood) to good results at the box office. The 1931 Squaw Man, with Warner Baxter as a cowboy and Lupe Velez as the Native American girl he falls for, also was a flop, and MGM let DeMille go, He went hat in hand back to Paramount, where he had to beg for a limited budget to make an elaborate spectacle called The Sign of the Cross about the Emperor Nero (Charles Laughton) and the Christians he persecutes. The Sign of the Cross was an enormous hit and DeMille kept working for Paramount until his death in 1959, making increasingly leaden and dull super-spectacles that made tons of money for both DeMille and Paramount – though as he grew older DeMille got lazier and his talents as a director actually declined, as you can see if you watch the original 1923 version of The Ten Commandments and the far better known 1956 remake back to back (easy to do since the currently available DVD of the 1956 The Ten Commandments includes the 1923 version as a bonus item).