You Can't Go Home (to Malibu) Again
Hot Saturday (1932)
directed by William A. Seiter
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Cary Grant looks like a 28-year-old teenager in this, the film that introduced him to Randolph Scott. Each is at odds with the other over the affections of a working girl, but let me just preempt my jokes about Bachelor Hall with a robust defense of Pre-Code Hollywood as a staunch ally of honest-to-goodness feminism. Nancy Carroll, as Ruth Brock, is a secretary at a small-town bank. She is routinely harassed for dates by a dozen co-workers, and routinely settles on one of them - the best-looking cad - for dances on Saturday nights.
At home, Ruth gives money to her no-account dad and takes unnecessary heat about her behavior from her mother, a middle-class terror obsessed with the neighbors. Scott is a one-time sweetheart who left the state to learn geology and returns with a respectable career. Grant (alias Romer Sheffield), grist for the rumor mill, spends money on parties at a mansion by the lake outside of town, where he lives with a woman he isn't married to.
Grant, the playboy, wants Ruth, in a grand, romantic, and imaginative way. Scott wants her, too, but for a wife in the rather routine sense. The cad Conny, offended by one of Romer's soirees (complete with a tamale stand done up as a liquor cart), takes it on himself to try and rape Ruth in a secluded cove. She escapes, flees to Romer's mansion, and returns home the next morning to face the slander that Conny spreads around.
Romer, for one, hopes Ruth is wrong about the morals she was taught regarding "security and happiness." She wants to be wrong, but she's willing to put up with a lot - too much - to try and make her parents proud. Happily, amazingly, director William Seiter doesn't side with mom and dad. Ruth's parents are social climbers, the geologist is a dullard, and not one of them is really much better than Conny, timid and selfish to a T. Romer doesn't win Ruth over or convince her of anything. He's simply the man she chooses when she decides who and what she wants.
He does get the best line, though, and it's this, just as Ruth thinks she's off to marry Bill Fadden because she has to: "There's not much to say, is there? Well, I've never lied to you, so I'm not going to congratulate you, or wish you happiness, just good luck."
You can't blame a woman (or a man) for falling in love with someone like that.
directed by William A. Seiter
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Cary Grant looks like a 28-year-old teenager in this, the film that introduced him to Randolph Scott. Each is at odds with the other over the affections of a working girl, but let me just preempt my jokes about Bachelor Hall with a robust defense of Pre-Code Hollywood as a staunch ally of honest-to-goodness feminism. Nancy Carroll, as Ruth Brock, is a secretary at a small-town bank. She is routinely harassed for dates by a dozen co-workers, and routinely settles on one of them - the best-looking cad - for dances on Saturday nights.
At home, Ruth gives money to her no-account dad and takes unnecessary heat about her behavior from her mother, a middle-class terror obsessed with the neighbors. Scott is a one-time sweetheart who left the state to learn geology and returns with a respectable career. Grant (alias Romer Sheffield), grist for the rumor mill, spends money on parties at a mansion by the lake outside of town, where he lives with a woman he isn't married to.
Grant, the playboy, wants Ruth, in a grand, romantic, and imaginative way. Scott wants her, too, but for a wife in the rather routine sense. The cad Conny, offended by one of Romer's soirees (complete with a tamale stand done up as a liquor cart), takes it on himself to try and rape Ruth in a secluded cove. She escapes, flees to Romer's mansion, and returns home the next morning to face the slander that Conny spreads around.
Romer, for one, hopes Ruth is wrong about the morals she was taught regarding "security and happiness." She wants to be wrong, but she's willing to put up with a lot - too much - to try and make her parents proud. Happily, amazingly, director William Seiter doesn't side with mom and dad. Ruth's parents are social climbers, the geologist is a dullard, and not one of them is really much better than Conny, timid and selfish to a T. Romer doesn't win Ruth over or convince her of anything. He's simply the man she chooses when she decides who and what she wants.
He does get the best line, though, and it's this, just as Ruth thinks she's off to marry Bill Fadden because she has to: "There's not much to say, is there? Well, I've never lied to you, so I'm not going to congratulate you, or wish you happiness, just good luck."
You can't blame a woman (or a man) for falling in love with someone like that.
posted by NPK at 8:59 PM
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