Matchstick Women

Hollywood history is filled with bad takes. The most famous is probably the assessment of Fred Astaire after his first screen test at RKO: "Can't act. Can't sing. Balding. Can dance a little." That's so breathtakingly off the rails you just have to hang your head and laugh. It makes director Mervyn LeRoy's opinion of Bette Davis look positively even-handed. He didn't think she could act. His conviction in this was so strong that he actively marginalized her part in their only film together, Three On a Match (1932). In his defense, Davis was about ten or twelve films away from stardom at that point, with her roles in pre-Code films being almost entirely marginal. She was often grossly miscast. It's not for nothing that Robert Aldrich cribbed footage for Baby Jane Hudson's adult career in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? from Davis's pre-Code film, Ex-Lady and Parachute Jumper, both made after Three On a Match. Perhaps on the advice of Davis herself, Aldrich picked those two films as her very worst performances. How much of this is on Davis and how much of this is on her earliest directors is open to debate, but it's hard not to cringe at her Southern accent in Parachute Jumper. What is most surprising about Three On a Match, then, is not that it squanders Bette Davis. She was consistently being squandered in her early films. Rather it is surprising that it also squanders its ostensible star, Joan Blondell. Blondell was top billed, and the film is categorically slanted toward her character and her rise from streetwise reform-school kid to high society paramour and wife. But LeRoy had eyes for his third lead actress, Ann Dvorak, who seizes the film away from her costars with a twitchy descent into degradation of the sort that would eventually ignite Davis's own stardom in Of Human Bondage two years later. Dvorak devours her part, vacillating between amoral social climber to reluctant kidnapper to trapped gangster's accomplice to strung out coke fiend. LeRoy abets her performance by filming her in the style of a madwoman from some silent melodrama.

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A Short Con

At the end of Blonde Crazy (1931, directed by Roy Del Ruth), I started to wonder what Jim Thompson would have made of the movie. Thompson, that blackest beast of the hard boiled writers, wrote plenty of stories about con men and lowlifes, and as soon as the thought of him scripting this movie occurred to me, I realized that Thompson's version would be The Grifters, which was in the back of my head to start with. James Cagney's Bert Harris isn't that far removed from Thompson's Roy Dolly, after all, though Joan Blondell's Ann Roberts is a character type that Thompson never wrote about, the virtuous bad girl. These are the sorts of things I think about after I see movies, and it's mostly useless. Blonde Crazy is hard boiled, but it's not noir. Not really. For the first two thirds of the movie, it's a romantic comedy, and near the end, it veers into melodrama.

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