.jpg) |
|
Blast from the Past: Carole Lombard
Edward Buzzell directed Virtue, a Pre-Code romantic melodrama, starring Carole Lombard in her first movie for Columbia Pictures.
Grade: C+ (** out of *****)
Carole Lombard plays Mae, a New York streetwalker, told by the police to leave town. However, she gets off the train at a suburban station, taking the cab of Jimmy Doyle (Pat O’Brien). Penniless, she slips away without paying the fare. Meanwhile, fellow prostitute Lil (Mayo Methot) advises her to find honest work.
Receiving a loan, Mae goes to pay Jimmy the fare, and despite arguing, there is mutually attraction. Gert (Shirley Grey), another ex prostitute, works at the same place.
Jimmy and Mae marry, but Mae has not told him about her past. When Mae is arrested for breaking bail conditions, Jimmy leaves her. He will try to make the marriage work contingent that Mae gives up prostitution and avoids old friends.
The police arrest Mae because she left her bag in Gert’s apartment. However, Jimmy had been following Mae and knows that Toots was with Gert. Lil gives Toots an alibi, then convinces him to go to the DA’s office and file complaint against Jimmy. However, when there, she rats Toots out for the murder of Gert.
In the end, Toots is taken into custody and the exonerated Mae is embraced by Jimmy.
Director Edward Buzzell
Beginning his career as an actor, Edward Buzzell (1895–1985) became a director in the 1930s and achieved relative fame with the Marx Brothers comedies, At the Circus (1939) and Go West (1940), and musicals, such was Best Foot Forward (1943), Song of the Thin Man (1947), and Neptune’s Daughter (1949), one of Esther Williams’ most popular pictures.
His staging of Virtue is rather primitive and stiff, and the script is also below mediocre, even though it was written by Robert Riskin, who in a couple of years woud become one of Hollywood’s top scribes in his collaborations with director Frank Capra.
Screenwriter Robert Riskin
He was Oscar nominated for Capra’s Lady for a Day (1933), with May Robson, which he had adapted from Damon Runyon short story; It Happened One Night (1934), for which he won the Oscar alongsde with Capra and actors Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert; Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) with Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur; You Can’t Take It with You (1938), which won the Best Picture Oscar, with Lionel Barrymore and James Stewart; and Here Comes the Groom (1951) with Bing Crosby and Jane Wyman.
Cast
Carole Lombard as Mae
Pat O’Brien as Jimmy
Ward Bond as Frank
Shirley Grey as Gert
Mayo Methot as Lil
Jack La Rue as Toots
Willard Robertson as MacKenzie
Credits:
Directed by Edward Buzzell
Screenplay by Robert Riskin; Story by Ethel Hill
Produced by Harry Cohn
Cinematography Joseph Walker
Edited by Maurice Wright
Production and distribution: Columbia Pictures
Release date: October 25, 1932
Running time: 69 minutes
