Bad Sister (Universal, 1931)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night shortly after 10 I ran my husband Charles and I a quite intriguing, even if not very good, movie on YouTube. It was the 1931 film Bad Sister, based on Booth Tarkington’s 1913 novel The Flirt. It’s a film whose main interest today is as Bette Davis’s first movie and Humphrey Bogart’s fourth feature, though as it turned out they both played roles quite different from the sorts of parts that would make them movie legends later. It’s set in the small town of Council City, Ohio and deals with the Madison family: John Madison (Charles Winninger), his wife (Emma Dunn) – if she has a first name we never learn what it is – and their kids: grown daughters Marianne (Sidney Fox), called “Cora” in Tarkington’s novel, and Laura (Bette Davis), their younger son Hedrick (David Durand), as well as Sam (Slim Summerville) and Amy (Helene Chadwick). We never learn whether Sam or Amy is the blood Madison, but they’re sufficiently part of the family that when Sam loses his job as a plumber John Madison invites them to stay with them as their house guests while Amy waits to have her baby. Bad Sister was made at a particularly fraught time in Bette Davis’s career because she was just beginning to establish herself in New York as a stage actress and really didn’t want to have anything to do with films, but Universal’s production head, Carl Laemmle, Jr. (the 20-year-old son of the studio’s founder whom Laemmle, Sr. had just put in charge), lured her to Hollywood with the promise of the starring role in Preston Sturges’ play Strictly Dishonorable as her first film. Only when Davis got to Hollywood Laemmle turned against her and said, “She has as much sex appeal as Slim Summerville!” Laemmle, Jr. gave the lead in Strictly Dishonorable to Sidney Fox, an actress he was apparently dating – at least that’s what Bette Davis thought and said for the rest of her life, including in two autobiographies – and then put Davis in support of Fox in this film.

It’ll be a surprise to audiences familiar with Davis’s later and much better movies that Sidney Fox is the titular “bad sister” and Bette Davis is the “good sister” – essentially she’s playing to Sidney Fox what Olivia De Havilland or Margaret Lindsay played to her in her later star vehicles at Warner Bros. – and it’s Fox who is stringing along her would-be boyfriends, Dr. Dick Lindley (Conrad Nagel, top-billed) and Wade Trumbull (heavy-set Bert Roach). Laura has a hopeless crush on Dr. Lindley – this was during the period when Conrad Nagel had been one of the first leading men to prove he could act with his voice, and he got cast in so many movies by casting directors who said, “Get Nagel; he can talk,” he complained that he and his wife could no longer just go to the movies for their own entertainment because he couldn’t find anything playing that he wasn’t in – and she writes about it in her diary (which she keeps in a notebook with the embossed title, “Lest we forget”), which Hedrick manages to get hold of and make fun of her about it. In fact, all the characters in this movie are so creepy about the only likable people in it are the Madisons’ maid, Minnie (ZaSu Pitts doing her usual voice-of-reason comic schtick; Erich von Stroheim cast her as a dramatic actress in three films, Greed, The Wedding March and Hello, Sister, but the self-destruction of Stroheim’s directorial career also took down Pitts’ serious acting chops as collateral damage) and a newsboy who gives John Madison a paper at the opening and is not seen nor heard from again.

One of Marianne’s dreams is to get out of Council City and make it to New York or Chicago, and she thinks she’s found her ticket to her dreams in the person of Valentine Corliss (Humphrey Bogart – when I wrote about his 1934 film Midnight I said that was his only Universal credit; I’d forgotten about Bad Sister!), who shows up in Council City announcing he’s a representative of the “Electro-Household Company” and he plans to build a factory there that will employ thousands of people and put Council City on the map economically. I’m not sure whether the audiences who saw this film in 1931 “got” that Valentine Corliss was a quite obvious con artist – I was asking myself if we saw him as a crook because in the late 1930’s he played gangsters almost exclusively (he would joke to friends that he could write all his lines on 3” x 5” index cards because he spoke the same gangster clichés in each film and the only thing that differed was the order in which he said them), though even in 1931 his fancy sports car, his well-tailored black suit and his supercilious manner probably marked him as no good to the audience even without Bogart’s later history to guide them. One of the fascinating enigmas of Bogart’s early career is that in his first foray at movie acting in the early 1930’s, mostly at Fox but with one film each at Universal (this one) and Columbia (Love Affair, 1932), he made one truly great movie – John Ford’s Up the River, in which he played an ex-con carefully concealing that fact from his family and friends – that showed some of the same world-weariness that would make Bogart a superstar in early-1940’s films like The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. But his other early roles were just nothing parts and it would take another decade for other filmmakers to get as much out of him as Ford had.

Anyway, Valentine Corliss romances Marianne Madison in some quite beautiful red-filtered twilight exteriors after their bizarre meet-cute – she went on a movie date with Dr. Lindley but, much to her disgust, he’d lent his car to his younger brother so they had to take the bus, and when they missed the bus home Corliss just happened to pull up and take her home while stranding the good doctor – and he tries to get her to get her dad to sign a letter assuring the other townspeople that he’s personally vetted Corliss and Corliss’s proposition is on the up-and-up. John Madison is waiting for a report from people he knows in New York on whether Corliss is to be trusted, but Marianne gets tired of waiting and uses her allowance check from her father to forge his signature on the letter. Then she and Corliss leave Council City to elope, only the no-good rotter leaves Marianne stranded in a hotel room and absconds with the money he’s collected from John Madison’s friends. (There’s no indication that Corliss ever gets caught or has to pay any price for his crime, which more than anything else marks Bad Sister as a product of the so-called “pre-Code” era.) John Madison accepts responsibility for the glowing report he gave Corliss and tries to cover for Marianne, who confesses that she forged his signature on Corliss’s letter, but taking moral and economic rectitude to positively masochistic extremes he announces that he will make good on all the money his friends lost on Corliss’s scam as long as they keep his daughter’s name out of it, even if he has to cash in his life insurance policy and sell his family’s home. In the end Dr. Lindley (ya remember Dr. Lindley?) falls for Laura, Marianne ends up with big old Wade on the rebound, and Amy dies in childbirth while the Madison family is stuck raising her son.

Bad Sister was directed by Hobart Henley, who’d made an earlier silent version of the same story under Tarkington’s original title, The Flirt, in 1922, and at least two of the crew members were way overqualified for this assignment: the cinematographer was Karl Freund and the make-up artist was the uncredited Jack P. Pierce. There are a few flashes in which we get glimpses of the characteristics that made Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart movie legends, notably one in which she slaps Marianne so hard she knocks her to the ground and I said, “At last, Bette Davis’s claws came out!” Mostly, though, Bad Sister is a mediocre movie of interest mainly for the superstar careers its second leads had later, and when Davis was asked about it during her later years she had nothing nice to say about it or about Bogart. For all the years their careers overlapped at Warner Bros., they only made two more films together (Marked Woman and Dark Victory; the former is a great movie while the latter is also excellent, but Bogart is preposterously miscast as an Irish jockey with a hopeless crush on Davis), and in later years Davis made clear her displeasure with the whole cult that had grown up around Bogart!