Dishonored Lady (Hunt Stromberg Productions, Mars Film Corporatlon, United Artists, 1947)

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

Last night (Wednesday, May 31) my husband Charles and I watched a rather odd movie called Dishonored Lady, a 1947 production from Hunt Stromberg’s independent company released through United Artists. Stromberg was a veteran of MGM and so was the film’s star, Hedy Lamarr, who had fallen in love with British leading man John Loder, Naturally Lamarr wanted to work with her new light o’love, but since Loder (who’d had his 15 minutes of fame about a decade earlier in his native land, starring in Alfred Hitchcock’s Sabotage and the 1937 version of King Solomon’s Mines – though in that one both he and the other white members of the cast were totally out-acted by Paul Robeson, no surprise there!) was under contract to RKO Lamarr had to work out her MGM contract. Stromberg bought the rights to a 1930 play, also called Dishonored Lady, by Edward Sheldon and Margaret Ayer Barnes (which may be part of the reason why the film seems so dated), and started the production in 1945 but ran afoul of the Production Code Administration for two years. The story casts Lamarr as high-class slut Madeleine Damian, who at the start of the film is art editor for a fancy magazine called Boulevard but frequently goes out on nights and weekends with various men, including her boss Victor Kranish (Paul Cavanagh), her former assistant Jack Garet (William Lundigan), and jeweler Felix Courtland (John Loder). One night Madeleine deliberately crashes her fancy car in a rather lame attempt at suicide; she happens to do this just outside the home of psychiatrist Dr. Richard Caleb (Morris Karnovsky), who starts treating her and tells her in as close to so many words as Stromberg could get past the Production Code that she’s a sex addict and she needs to quit her job and assume a quieter lifestyle. (This may be the first movie that openly dealt with the concept of sex addiction.)

While she was still working at Boulevard she turned down a special layout featuring Courtland’s merchandise, which naturally ticked him off as a major advertiser, but when she finally met him she ended up in a tryst with him even though the film never quite specifies whether he got his layout in the magazine after all. In the cheap rooming house she moves into, where Margaret Hamilton – of all people! – plays her landlady, “Mrs. Geiger,” she meets a neighbor, an aspiring medical researcher named Dr. David Cousins (Dennis O’Keefe) who needs a skilled artist to sketch his microscope slides. She gets the job – previously she’s been supporting herself, sort of, as a painter but she’s only sold one picture – and the two start dating. Eventually the two finish their research paper and decide to get married, only Dr. Cousins goes off to present the paper at a scientific conference in Chicago, and Felix Courtland has tracked her down and invites her to his place for a tryst in the rain. As sheer luck (or Production Code fiat) would have it, she escapes before doing the down-’n’-dirty with him, only in her haste to leave she leaves Courtland’s door open and Jack Garet sneaks in, the two have an argument and Garet clubs him to death with a pedestal cigarette lighter. Madeleine is arrested for Courtland’s murder – the cops, Sgts. Patella (James Flavin) and Bartlett (Robert B. Williams), literally walk into her room in the dead of morning to take her into custody – and Dr. Cousins is aghast at finding out the truth about his girlfriend even though he had no idea who she really was. He breaks off their engagement, and she essentially sleepwalks through her trial, refusing to allow her attorney to cross-examine any of the prosecution’s witnesses. (Her defense attorney isn’t listed on imdb.com, but the prosecutor, O’Brien, is; he’s played by Douglass Dumbrille, usually cast as a slimy villain.) Things turn around for Madeleine when her attorney calls Dr. Cousins as a witness, and asked under oath if he’s still in love with her, he says yes. That inspires Madeleine to take the stand herself, and among other things she talks about the wall safe on Courtland’s apartment which contains some of his rarest and most valuable jewels.

On the basis of this, the police investigate Garet for the murder and ultimately arrest him, and Madeleine goes free and in a final scene that is strikingly reminiscent of the ending of Casablanca (for which Lamarr was actually considered, though it’s a good thing Ingrid Bergman was ultimately cast; she was almost as sexy as Lamarr and as an actress she was practically in a different universe!), she and Dr. Cousins meet at the airport and she gets on the flight that’s going to take him to his dream research job in California. Dishonored Lady looks more or less like a film noir – Paramount veteran Lucien Andriot was the cinematographer, and his work is properly shadowy and high-contrasty – but for the first hour or so it’s really more a romantic melodrama than anything else, and it’s only when Courtland gets clubbed to death that the story finally takes a detour into the noir world. (I suspect Stromberg was going for the same mix of romance and noir that had worked for fellow producer Jerry Wald in Mildred Pierce two years earlier, for which Wald had had to insert a murder that wasn’t in James M. Cain’s original novel to get it past the Production Code Administration.) The Production Code censors really worked this story over; they forced Stromberg to delete a scene in Mexico between Madeleine and one of her tricks, and they demanded deletion of all references to Madeleine’s parents – though a flashback in which she talks about her late father, who likewise was a sex addict as well as a talented artist who ultimately killed himself, made the cut.

Dishonored Lady is a strange movie (one of Lamarr’s previous post-MGM films had actually been called The Strange Woman), and it’s no one’s fault that both its title and the name of its star evoke comparisons with much better, or at least more widely known, films. I couldn’t help but think of Dishonored (1931), the marvelous espionage melodrama starring Marlene Dietrich and directed by Josef von Sternberg (even though both Sternberg and Dietrich hated the title and wanted to call the film X-27, after the code number of Dietrich’s spy character), while Charles said whenever he hears the name “Hedy Lamarr” he can’t help flashing back to Blazing Saddles and thinking, “That’s Hedley.” Dishonored Lady was directed by Robert Stevenson – Britain’s second-leading director of the 1930’s (next to Alfred Hitchcock) and likewise under contract to David O. Selznick, who took a loan-out credit on him. Stevenson had worked with Loder before on The Man Who Changed His Mind (1936), released in the U.S. as The Man Who Lived Again and quite possibly the best of Boris Karloff’s films in which he played a mad scientist. The script was by Edmund H. North, who had the bizarre task of rewriting the story again and again to satisfy the Production Code’s demands, with uncredited assists by André de Toth and Ben Hecht. And of course Dishonored Lady is also one of those annoyingly sexist films like Dynamite (1929), Female (1933) and Lady in the Dark (1944) in which a highly independent and successful woman has to be bounced down the status ladder to assume her “proper” role as subservient to her man!