Thje Devil to Pay! (Howard Productions, United Artists, 1930)

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

Last night at 10 my husband Charles and I watched a “freebie” from Amazon Prime – a movie included with our subscription instead of one where we have to pay a separate rental fee over and above the cost of Prime membership – called The Devil to Pay! (with the exclamation point), a 1930 film from Samuel Goldwyn’s company (though billed as “Howard Productions, Inc.” after Frances Howard, the maiden name of Mrs. Samuel Goldwyn) starring Ronald Colman. It’s the sort of light-hearted romantic comedy Goldwyn had had the sense to put Colman in after he realized the heavy-breathing love stories Colman, Rudolph Vaientino and John Gilbert had become stars in wouldn’t work in sound films. Colman played William Hale, son of Lord Leland (Frederick Kerr, best known as the father of Colin Clive in the original Frankenstein), who as the film opens is upset tol the point of threatening to disown him after he learns that Hale is selling all the possessions Lord Leland staked him to so he could start a plantation in Kenya. We first see William Hale when he takes over as the property’s auctioneer, deliberately selling pieces to lower bidders than the ones who’ve technically “won” because he likes them and making clear he’s only interested in getting enough money to pay for a passage back home to England and enough left over to stake him to a visit to the nearest horse-race track. Hale explains his perpetual dire straits to us by saying he’s a compulsive gambler and lost all his money to “horses with noses not long enough, and cards that were good but not good enough.” He arrives in England with 20 pounds to his name and spends 15 of them on a dog named George, a wire fox terrier who looks a lot like the dog in the Thin Man films but wasn’t.

Alas, George quickly gets forgotten about and doesn’t appear until late in the movie, and instead it becomes a rom-com in which Hale is smitten with Dorothy Hope (Loretta Young), whose father (David Torrence) has made a fortune in linoleum and wants to keep her from falling in love with a fortune-hunter. So he had arranged for her to marry Russian Grand Duke Paul (Paul Cavanagh), a stuck-up pill whom Dorothy can’t stand. Given that basic information, you could probably write the rest of it yourself and achieve about the same result as the actual writer, Frederick Lonsdale, who had a reputation for writing similar stories for the London stage, though this is a screen original (albeit with Benjamin Glazer credited as “adapter”) rather than one of Lonsdale’s plays. It’s inevitable, given the rules of the genre, that Dorothy will fall for charming, irrepressible William Hale, and there’s a neat twist towards the ending in which Dorothy, having a jealous hissy-fit because William went to Liverpool to visit former girlfriend Mary Cheyne (Myrna Loy, billed sixth and actually out-acting the other principals), writes him a check for five thousand pounds. William cashes the check – Dorothy was expecting him to virtuously refuse it – but then gives the money o Grand Duke Paul, who turns out not to have any money at all and be precisely the sort of male gold-digger from whom Mr. Hope was trying to protect his daughter. The Devil to Pay! was directed by George Fitzmaurice, who has not fared well in Hollywood histories (in her biography of Samuel Goldwyn, Carol Easton said of Fitzmaurice, “He made bad pictures beautifully”) but had made enough of a reputation that he not only got a separate “A George Fitzmaurize Production” credit besides h is credit for director, his directorial credit featured his name in cursive script: a rare honor in those days. Rudolph Valentino had wanted to work with Fitzmaurice his entire career and finally got the chance to on his last film, The Son of the Sheik (1926), so obviously someone out there at the time thought Fitzmaurice was a great director.

In The Devil to Pay! he turns in a fully competent job, getting an effectively insouciant performance from Colman and quite dignified work from Loretta Young and Myrna Loy – and at least Loy was playing a woman legitimately in love with her man instead of the nymphomaniac vamp she usually was cast in during her early career. (The legend was that Louis B. Mayer had to deal with Loy’s insistence that she was tired of playing “loose women” – and after loaning her out to RKO for a beautiful film with John Barrymore, Topaze, Mayer saw the movie and told Loy, “You were right. From now on you will always be a lady.”) Half an hour into this 72-minute movie, Ronald Colman and Loretta Young visit an arcade in which, among other things, they play a game called “coconut shy” which fascinated Charles enough he looked it up online. The Wikipedia page on “coconut shy” describes it as “a traditional game frequently found as a sidestall at funfairs and fêtes. The game consists of throwing wooden balls at a row of coconuts balanced on posts. Typically a player buys three balls and wins when each coconut is successfully dislodged. In some cases other prizes may be won instead of the coconuts. The word ‘shy’ in this context means to toss or throw.” It’s a nice offshoot to an extended sequence in which Colman’s and Young’s characters also ride on swings shaped to look like boats and have a picnic outdoors while a horse race Colman’s character has bet on is taking place at a nearby track, and naturally Grand Duke Paul (whom we don’t yet know is a bounder) is upset that Dorothy is with some other guy eating lunch on the grass instead of in the stands with him.

The adjective I keep thinking of to describe The Devil to Pay! is “charming”; like a lot of other movies, it’s a triumph of style over (lack of) substance, though it led to Colman demanding heavier roles that would show off his acting chops. Three years after The Devil to Pay! Goldwyn cast Colman in a story called The Masquerader in which he played a dual role – a Member of Parliament who’s secretly a drug addict and a lookalike double who’s recruited to stand in for him – and the film was a total failure at the box office. Colman demanded a release from his Goldwyn contract – which he got – and developed an aversion to dual roles. When he was offered the lead in MGM’s A Tale of Two Cities the original plan was for Colman to play both Sidney Carton and Charles Darnay, who agrees to be guillotined in Carton’s place, but Colman would only agree to play the part if he just played Carton and not Darnay. Two years later the same producer, David O. Selznick, offered Colman The Prisoner of Zenda, in which he had to play a dual role for the story to work at all – and after much trepidation he eventually did, and had one of the biggest hits of his career.