The Lady Lies (Paramount, 1929)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Later on July 4 I stumbled across a YouTube post of an old movie that looked intriguing – a 1929 film called The Lady Lies, directed by Hobart Henley, written by John Meehan from a stage play he also created, and starring Walter Huston and Claudette Colbert. My husband Charles had his doubts about this one, worried that since it was an early talkie we’d be in for the soporific line deliveries and long … pauses … between each actor’s … cue line and … their own typical of all too many sound films, especially ones with relatively weak directors. Henley was actually a pretty good director who made at least one of my all-time favorite films, Night World (1932), an oddball hour-long item from Universal in 1932 that was a combination gangster movie and musical and the only film on which both Boris Karloff and Busby Berkeley worked. He also made Bette Davis’s first film, 1931’s Bad Sister (which also featured Humphrey Bogart in an early role as a swindler; fr my review, see https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/06/bad-sister-universal-1931.html), as well as having directed the earlier 1922 silent version of the same story, The Flirt. Henley also directed the early Maurice Chevalier musical, The Big Pond (1930), also with Colbert, which gave Chevalier two of his biggest hits, “You Brought a New Kind of Love to Me” and “Living in the Sunlight, Loving in the Moonlight.” Also on Henley’s résumé was a 1930 item called Roadhouse Nights which reunited him with two cast members from The Lady Lies, Claudette Colbert and Charlie Ruggles, along with Jimmy Durante (in his first film) and a story supposedly based on – but actually having almost nothing to do with – Dashiell Hammett’s first novel, Red Harvest.

Actually the problem with The Lady Lies wasn’t Henley’s direction, which was adequate and workmanlike, but Meehan’s script. The title is a bit of a misnomer because the biggest lie in the movie is told not by a lady but by one of the male characters, Robert Rossiter, Jr. (Tom Brown, who’s quite good in this and deserved more of a career than he got: he worked steadily for decades but largely in anonymous character parts). Robert, Jr. is the teenage son of Robert Rossiter, Sr. (Walter Huston), a corporate lawyer with a high-class clientele. In the first scene of the film, we see him with his so-called “drinking buddy” (the fact that Prohibition was still in effect when this movie was made is cheerily ignored, as usual for Hollywood in this genuinely “pre-Code” era: the Motion Picture Production Code wasn’t promulgated until 1930 and wasn’t seriously enforced until 1934) Charlie Tyler (Charlie Ruggles, less foofy than he was later). Charlie asks Rossiter to handle his upcoming divorce (from a wife we never actually see), and he talks on and on and on about the difference between blondes and brunettes, especially on the expense of breaking up with them. Rossiter self-righteously refuses either to take Charlie’s case or to refer him to another attorney. Charlie has a long-term mistress, Hilda Pearson (Betty Garde), who’s friends with a department-store sales clerk (Claudette Colbert) whose name according to the film’s imdb.com and Wikipedia pages is “Joyce Roamer” but the actors pronounce it “Rome,” like the Italian capital. Rossiter meets Joyce in the department store where she works while he’s ordering a birthday present for his daughter Josephine (Patricia Deering), who like her older brother Bob, Jr. is away at boarding school in New England. Joyce suggests a fur jacket as the present and sneaks in a couple of scarves as accessories. Soon she and Robert start dating, though it’s an entirely licit relationship that never gets near the bedroom.

Robert is a widower – his children’s mother died several years before and he hadn’t thought seriously about dating again until he met Joyce – so there’s nothing in the way of him and Joyce getting together except the excessively moralistic attitudes of his children and their uncle and aunt, Henry and Amelia Tuttle (Duncan Penwarden and Virginia True Boardman). The Tuttles bring the Rossiter kids down from Salem, Massachusetts for what we assume is their spring break, and are appalled at the way Robert treats his children, which is to respect them and treat them like adults instead of bossing them around. The clash of values between the Tuttles and the Rossiters is shown rather artfully when Henry Tuttle insists that there be a prayer of grace before they eat dinner – and his “grace” is so unusually long it seems to go on forever. The Tuttles threaten to sue Robert for custody of his children if he doesn’t marry the wife they’ve picked out for him, fellow socialite Ann Gardner (Jean Dixon). The big lie that powers the plot comes from the kids; they call up Joyce and tell her that Robert has been in a bad accident and has fractured his skull. Naturally she comes over right away, only to find that Robert didn’t have an accident, he isn’t there (he went out to pace the grounds and be alone), and the children pulled this hoax to read her the riot act and tell her that under no circumstances should she continue to date their father. Joyce is so devastated that she walks to the balcony of her friend Hilda’s apartment and threatens to jump. Hilda serves as the voice of reason in all this and engineers a reconciliation between Robert and Joyce, and ultimately the children agree rather grudgingly to accept Joyce as their new stepmother. The plot is pure soap opera and one admires the skill of Walter Huston and Claudette Colbert as actors that they try their damnedest to put some flesh and bones on these cardboard characters. Ultimately, though, The Lady Lies just creaks along to its predictable outcome and seems longer than its 75 minutes.

There’s also an odd scene that shows the technical crudities of the early sound era; it takes place at a restaurant, and the challenge of mixing dialogue, music (which is supposed to be source music being played by either a live band or on records), and the “wild” noises of the customers defeated Paramount’s sound engineers. The customers’ noises pretty much drowned out everything else, including the dialogue! Paramount shot this movie at their Long Island studios in New York City, though the only thing this did to the movie for good or ill is it meant they could use Broadway stage actors who hadn’t yet moved to Hollywood for a serious attempt to make it in the movie business. This early in the sound era they were still shooting movies in multiple languages – which meant it helped big-time when they had an actor like Colbert who was bilingual (English and French). In fact she even speaks a bit of French in this otherwise all-English movie. There’s nothing really wrong with The Lady Lies but there’s nothing right about it, either; it’s just a series of predictable plot situations that lurches towards the ending we all saw coming anyway. Fortunately things would get better for both the stars: Walter Huston would go on to make two films as President of the United States – a real one in D. W. Griffith’s woefully underrated biopic Abraham Lincoln (1930) and a fictitious one, “Judson Hammond,” in William Randolph Hearst’s personal production Gabriel Over the White House (1933) – and help launch the illustrious career of his son, John Huston, by insisting he get an additional dialogue writing gig on his film A House Divided (1931) – also a story about a May-December romance. Colbert in turn would make three major films in 1934: Cecil B. DeMille’s Cleopatra; Frank Capra’s screwball comedy classic It Happened One Night, which won her the Academy Award; and John M. Stahl’s gripping social drama Imitation of Life, which should have been her Oscar-winner. She’d reign as a major star for almost two decades until she started to get too persnickety about her parts: she walked out of Frank Capra’s State of the Union (1948) and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950) and was replaced – stunningly, in both cases – by Katharine Hepburn in State of the Union and Bette Davis in All About Eve.