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I haven't had a fight in a restaurant since I protected the honor of Mademoiselle from Armentières
I make no great claims for The Girl from 10th Avenue (1935). It's just a neat small romantic comedy with a couple of well-placed edges and having seen it twice now I remain a little surprised it wasn't a pre-Code.
I am aware it's not as nearly pre-Code as it could have been. Technically the film was the fourth screen version of Hubert Henry Davies' 1914 stage play Outcast and all previous versions filmed under the original title appear to have involved some degree of prostitution, infant mortality, attempted suicide, and South America. Here you could call Miriam Brady (Bette Davis) a working girl only in the sense that she has a job sewing labels and even so she's due for a layoff at the end of the week; hence while she rescues the recently jilted and scathingly sloshed Geoffrey Sherwood (Ian Hunter) from making a scene outside his ex-fiancée's wedding out of passing decency and a flicker of appreciation for this disheveled swell grandly burlesquing the ceremony he wasn't invited to—"'Valentine, do you take this social register parasite to be your legal wedded toy, to hate, dishonor, and ignore?' 'Since it brings material advances both social and financial and stupefies an annoying innate fineness with which I've been afflicted, I do, I do, I do.' 'Then I pronounce you man and wife and a cockeyed credit to the country!'"—she freely admits to the society pals who track them down on her lunch hour that she can't afford to turn down the hundred bucks they're offering to keep him occupied until after the honeymooners have sailed. It doesn't sound like such an unpleasant job. Geoff has a nice face, a sense of humor, the ability to apologize and mean it even when three sheets to the wind. He doesn't even want to be left alone, still reeling in the wake of the chic, vanished Valentine (Katharine Alexander). Miriam makes him get a shave, he insists on buying her a new dress, by midnight they're toasting their respective exes in champagne. And she never collects on that C-note, because the next morning she and Geoff wake up in a bed-and-breakfast in Harrison, NY to discover that they got drunk-married by a justice of the peace at three in the morning with a ring from the court clerk. Agitatedly aware of the gulf between his law practice on Park Street and her hand-to-mouth on 10th Avenue, she immediately tries to offer an annulment, but much to her surprise, even hungover he doesn't seem eager to take it. "I couldn't use you like that," he protests. "Don't worry about me," she assures him with the light toughness of a Depression-era heroine. "I'll stay with you as long as you need me and then we'll quit—friends." That impermanence becomes the cornerstone of their marriage, the reason they can both agree to stay in it; it's only temporary, so who cares if six weeks and then six months and then a year later they're still together, domestically nesting in a brownstone on Washington Square while a sobered-up Geoff works conscientiously at his new office job and Miriam takes lessons in gentility from their redoubtable landlady, former Floradora Girl Mrs. Martin (Alison Skipworth)? Sleek, dark Valentine Marland, apparently, swinging back into town on the rebound from her wealthy husband (Colin Clive) and still showing a proprietary interest in Geoff. Before long she's calling on him at the office, coincidentally running into him on the links. "You haven't come here to tell me, I suppose, that you've found out now it's too late that you made a mistake?" She turns one modish shoulder against his sarcasm, as brutal as if he's trying to make himself believe it; she's a fever never fully broken and she can afford to wait. Miriam isn't and can't and won't. "Any time Geoff feels like that, he can go, he knows that," she informs her rival in her most martini-polished tones, as Mrs. Martin watches as closely as a trainer at a prizefight. "But I'm not going to have him stolen from me—especially not by you."
What I like best about this plot is that it is not about jealousy or really even fighting over a man, although a grapefruit will be hurled with front-page-making force at the Waldorf: it is much more about whether Miriam believes she's worth fighting for, the kind of person who deserves to be loved or the kind of person who only rates as a convenience. If the film's post-Breen production scrubbed any chance of her character as a sex worker, the potential remains present in her interactions with her supposed betters and their habit of substituting largesse for empathy or even socialization—Geoff stumbles badly with Miriam early on when he tries to pay her for plain human kindness and the morning after their blackout marriage, even before he's got his eyes quite focused, she's drawing up the accounts of the previous night's expenses so that she can't be accused of coasting on his dime. She's that sensitive to the economics of their acquaintance. She can't afford not to be. At the six-week mark, when his same society pals (John Eldredge and Phillip Reed) track them down again in their new-wedded digs, it is crawlingly obvious that it never crosses their minds until stated outright and forcefully by Geoff that floss-blonde, book-borrowing Miriam's his wife, not his clever, amusing, socially unsuitable mistress. Valentine recognizes the marriage enough to bristle across the tables at the Waldorf, but seems to regard it as an advanced form of slumming, no object to the affairs of their own proper kind. Even Geoff with his genuine attachment to Miriam and his honest efforts at reinvention is much too easily persuaded that the tension in his marriage is the fault of its inherent misalliance, not the audience-obvious fact that he's behaving like an entitled heel. Until or unless her husband can get over himself, Miriam's only ally in the upper crust she's half-married into is Clive's John Marland, who gets two scenes and a blink and I love him. About a week before rewatching The Girl from 10th Avenue, I happened to catch the actor in one of the weirdest post-Codes of my recent experience, Frank Borzage's History Is Made at Night (1937). The title is breathtaking romance; the plot is half Lubitsch touch, half Gothic melodrama, and half disaster film. An ocean liner runs into an iceberg. A little hand-face character named Coco is performed by Señor Wences. I got an awed headache from the genre-flipping and while I am not confident it's possible to steal a movie entirely from Jean Arthur and Charles Boyer, Clive comes as near as dammit with the twitchy, self-loathing jealousy of his abusive husband who is simultaneously a nasty piece of real-life work and a monster from the Romantic id. Here, by sharp and touching contrast, he's a bland sort of toff at a distance who up close admits with a hunch of his tailored shoulders, "I'm not considered brilliant—easy to fool and all that, Mrs. Sherwood," and your heart goes out to him like Andrew Aguecheek recalling that he was adored once too. Fidgeting with his cane and hat and gloves on the bench beside Miriam, he looks desperately uncomfortable warning her that his wife has designs on her husband, but the conversation is far more of a bid to save her marriage than any attempt on behalf of his own. Another film might have flirted with the parallel, but he's not a romantic alternative; he's that much rarer thing in the movies, a heterosexual friend. He's just as kind to Geoffrey when they meet at their shared gentlemen's club, in their cups and on the outs with their respective women; he can't sing "I'll String Along with You" for beans, but he makes a tactlessly sincere Cupid once he figures out who Geoff really loves and what he's prepared to do about it. Clive had one of those whiskey-sour voices that could put an edge on even utilitarian dialogue, but Marland's exit line is legitimately delightful, as he rolls himself off to bed—in Valentine's bedroom, where Geoffrey is hesitantly standing—with the drowsily racy, "Well, good luck, Geoff, if I don't see you again."
The reason that Geoff can run into Marland at their club, of course, is the other thing I really love about this movie and the reason I actually am glad it was produced after 1934, because it's proof that it was still possible for a Hollywood woman to call a man out in a showstopper denunciation of double standards and unacknowledged emotional labor:
"Oh, so you're going to move out to the club. Like the perfect gentleman. Why don't you throw me out tonight—out on the street where you picked me up? Your kind don't do it that way. You ditch your women with dignity, don't you? You leave them the apartment, the check on the dresser, and you move out to the club. You're not going to move out on me, because I'm going to spoil your act for you . . . Listen to you, nothing. That's all I've done since I first met you—listen to your hooey. How I ate it up! And for what? So I'd be fit to associate with a cut-rate gigolo like you? That's all you are at heart, a gigolo. You don't take money from women, but you take something better, something you haven't got—guts. Oh, no, you can't stand on your own feet. The minute a woman walks out from under you, you flop in the mud and you lay there until another woman comes along and picks you up. That's what I did. Well, I guess I was lonely. I wanted some love—I thought you wanted love, too. But you don't know what the word means. And now that you're the big, strong stuffed shirt again, the vulgar little fool that helped you out might cramp your style. He's embarrassed by the way she holds her fork! So he's taking his dress suit and his topper and he's moving out to the club. Well, get this. You're not moving out on me. There isn't a heel in the world that's going to do that. 'Cause I'm moving out on you!"
It's even nice to see the resolution of this four-cornered plot ultimately show some nuance toward Valentine, who till then has figured strictly as the other woman. I may just not have seen enough women's pictures of the '30's and '40's; in the era of Code enforcement, I expect that kind of maturity mostly from Dorothy Arzner and film noir. Anyway, I've liked Bette Davis ever since The Petrified Forest (1936) and Ian Hunter ever since The Long Voyage Home (1940) and I'm beginning to think that Colin Clive, like David Manners, is iconically but not perhaps fairly represented by his work in horror. Alison Skipworth remains unknown to me outside of this movie, but she's just majestic in it—buttonholed by a reporter after the fracas at the Waldorf, she straight-arms Miriam out of the picture and declares with the utmost élan, "Never since the Grand Duke Boris bit my neck in public have I been so humiliated!" The whole thing runs 69 minutes and was directed for Warner Bros. by Alfred E. Green, who I don't know that I have any particular feelings about. This association brought to you by my fortuitous backers at Patreon.
I am aware it's not as nearly pre-Code as it could have been. Technically the film was the fourth screen version of Hubert Henry Davies' 1914 stage play Outcast and all previous versions filmed under the original title appear to have involved some degree of prostitution, infant mortality, attempted suicide, and South America. Here you could call Miriam Brady (Bette Davis) a working girl only in the sense that she has a job sewing labels and even so she's due for a layoff at the end of the week; hence while she rescues the recently jilted and scathingly sloshed Geoffrey Sherwood (Ian Hunter) from making a scene outside his ex-fiancée's wedding out of passing decency and a flicker of appreciation for this disheveled swell grandly burlesquing the ceremony he wasn't invited to—"'Valentine, do you take this social register parasite to be your legal wedded toy, to hate, dishonor, and ignore?' 'Since it brings material advances both social and financial and stupefies an annoying innate fineness with which I've been afflicted, I do, I do, I do.' 'Then I pronounce you man and wife and a cockeyed credit to the country!'"—she freely admits to the society pals who track them down on her lunch hour that she can't afford to turn down the hundred bucks they're offering to keep him occupied until after the honeymooners have sailed. It doesn't sound like such an unpleasant job. Geoff has a nice face, a sense of humor, the ability to apologize and mean it even when three sheets to the wind. He doesn't even want to be left alone, still reeling in the wake of the chic, vanished Valentine (Katharine Alexander). Miriam makes him get a shave, he insists on buying her a new dress, by midnight they're toasting their respective exes in champagne. And she never collects on that C-note, because the next morning she and Geoff wake up in a bed-and-breakfast in Harrison, NY to discover that they got drunk-married by a justice of the peace at three in the morning with a ring from the court clerk. Agitatedly aware of the gulf between his law practice on Park Street and her hand-to-mouth on 10th Avenue, she immediately tries to offer an annulment, but much to her surprise, even hungover he doesn't seem eager to take it. "I couldn't use you like that," he protests. "Don't worry about me," she assures him with the light toughness of a Depression-era heroine. "I'll stay with you as long as you need me and then we'll quit—friends." That impermanence becomes the cornerstone of their marriage, the reason they can both agree to stay in it; it's only temporary, so who cares if six weeks and then six months and then a year later they're still together, domestically nesting in a brownstone on Washington Square while a sobered-up Geoff works conscientiously at his new office job and Miriam takes lessons in gentility from their redoubtable landlady, former Floradora Girl Mrs. Martin (Alison Skipworth)? Sleek, dark Valentine Marland, apparently, swinging back into town on the rebound from her wealthy husband (Colin Clive) and still showing a proprietary interest in Geoff. Before long she's calling on him at the office, coincidentally running into him on the links. "You haven't come here to tell me, I suppose, that you've found out now it's too late that you made a mistake?" She turns one modish shoulder against his sarcasm, as brutal as if he's trying to make himself believe it; she's a fever never fully broken and she can afford to wait. Miriam isn't and can't and won't. "Any time Geoff feels like that, he can go, he knows that," she informs her rival in her most martini-polished tones, as Mrs. Martin watches as closely as a trainer at a prizefight. "But I'm not going to have him stolen from me—especially not by you."
What I like best about this plot is that it is not about jealousy or really even fighting over a man, although a grapefruit will be hurled with front-page-making force at the Waldorf: it is much more about whether Miriam believes she's worth fighting for, the kind of person who deserves to be loved or the kind of person who only rates as a convenience. If the film's post-Breen production scrubbed any chance of her character as a sex worker, the potential remains present in her interactions with her supposed betters and their habit of substituting largesse for empathy or even socialization—Geoff stumbles badly with Miriam early on when he tries to pay her for plain human kindness and the morning after their blackout marriage, even before he's got his eyes quite focused, she's drawing up the accounts of the previous night's expenses so that she can't be accused of coasting on his dime. She's that sensitive to the economics of their acquaintance. She can't afford not to be. At the six-week mark, when his same society pals (John Eldredge and Phillip Reed) track them down again in their new-wedded digs, it is crawlingly obvious that it never crosses their minds until stated outright and forcefully by Geoff that floss-blonde, book-borrowing Miriam's his wife, not his clever, amusing, socially unsuitable mistress. Valentine recognizes the marriage enough to bristle across the tables at the Waldorf, but seems to regard it as an advanced form of slumming, no object to the affairs of their own proper kind. Even Geoff with his genuine attachment to Miriam and his honest efforts at reinvention is much too easily persuaded that the tension in his marriage is the fault of its inherent misalliance, not the audience-obvious fact that he's behaving like an entitled heel. Until or unless her husband can get over himself, Miriam's only ally in the upper crust she's half-married into is Clive's John Marland, who gets two scenes and a blink and I love him. About a week before rewatching The Girl from 10th Avenue, I happened to catch the actor in one of the weirdest post-Codes of my recent experience, Frank Borzage's History Is Made at Night (1937). The title is breathtaking romance; the plot is half Lubitsch touch, half Gothic melodrama, and half disaster film. An ocean liner runs into an iceberg. A little hand-face character named Coco is performed by Señor Wences. I got an awed headache from the genre-flipping and while I am not confident it's possible to steal a movie entirely from Jean Arthur and Charles Boyer, Clive comes as near as dammit with the twitchy, self-loathing jealousy of his abusive husband who is simultaneously a nasty piece of real-life work and a monster from the Romantic id. Here, by sharp and touching contrast, he's a bland sort of toff at a distance who up close admits with a hunch of his tailored shoulders, "I'm not considered brilliant—easy to fool and all that, Mrs. Sherwood," and your heart goes out to him like Andrew Aguecheek recalling that he was adored once too. Fidgeting with his cane and hat and gloves on the bench beside Miriam, he looks desperately uncomfortable warning her that his wife has designs on her husband, but the conversation is far more of a bid to save her marriage than any attempt on behalf of his own. Another film might have flirted with the parallel, but he's not a romantic alternative; he's that much rarer thing in the movies, a heterosexual friend. He's just as kind to Geoffrey when they meet at their shared gentlemen's club, in their cups and on the outs with their respective women; he can't sing "I'll String Along with You" for beans, but he makes a tactlessly sincere Cupid once he figures out who Geoff really loves and what he's prepared to do about it. Clive had one of those whiskey-sour voices that could put an edge on even utilitarian dialogue, but Marland's exit line is legitimately delightful, as he rolls himself off to bed—in Valentine's bedroom, where Geoffrey is hesitantly standing—with the drowsily racy, "Well, good luck, Geoff, if I don't see you again."
The reason that Geoff can run into Marland at their club, of course, is the other thing I really love about this movie and the reason I actually am glad it was produced after 1934, because it's proof that it was still possible for a Hollywood woman to call a man out in a showstopper denunciation of double standards and unacknowledged emotional labor:
"Oh, so you're going to move out to the club. Like the perfect gentleman. Why don't you throw me out tonight—out on the street where you picked me up? Your kind don't do it that way. You ditch your women with dignity, don't you? You leave them the apartment, the check on the dresser, and you move out to the club. You're not going to move out on me, because I'm going to spoil your act for you . . . Listen to you, nothing. That's all I've done since I first met you—listen to your hooey. How I ate it up! And for what? So I'd be fit to associate with a cut-rate gigolo like you? That's all you are at heart, a gigolo. You don't take money from women, but you take something better, something you haven't got—guts. Oh, no, you can't stand on your own feet. The minute a woman walks out from under you, you flop in the mud and you lay there until another woman comes along and picks you up. That's what I did. Well, I guess I was lonely. I wanted some love—I thought you wanted love, too. But you don't know what the word means. And now that you're the big, strong stuffed shirt again, the vulgar little fool that helped you out might cramp your style. He's embarrassed by the way she holds her fork! So he's taking his dress suit and his topper and he's moving out to the club. Well, get this. You're not moving out on me. There isn't a heel in the world that's going to do that. 'Cause I'm moving out on you!"
It's even nice to see the resolution of this four-cornered plot ultimately show some nuance toward Valentine, who till then has figured strictly as the other woman. I may just not have seen enough women's pictures of the '30's and '40's; in the era of Code enforcement, I expect that kind of maturity mostly from Dorothy Arzner and film noir. Anyway, I've liked Bette Davis ever since The Petrified Forest (1936) and Ian Hunter ever since The Long Voyage Home (1940) and I'm beginning to think that Colin Clive, like David Manners, is iconically but not perhaps fairly represented by his work in horror. Alison Skipworth remains unknown to me outside of this movie, but she's just majestic in it—buttonholed by a reporter after the fracas at the Waldorf, she straight-arms Miriam out of the picture and declares with the utmost élan, "Never since the Grand Duke Boris bit my neck in public have I been so humiliated!" The whole thing runs 69 minutes and was directed for Warner Bros. by Alfred E. Green, who I don't know that I have any particular feelings about. This association brought to you by my fortuitous backers at Patreon.
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It's one of the lines spoken by Geoffrey in his introductory drunk scene. I try to take the titles of my review posts from the films themselves.
The Peace of Harvey
Please excuse me for completely ignoring your in-depth review (which I will read after work) to focus on your post title:
Fred Harvey is credited with creating the first restaurant chain in the U.S. Harvey and his company also became leaders in promoting tourism in the American Southwest in the late 19th century. The company and its employees, including the famous waitresses who came to be known as Harvey Girls, successfully brought new higher standards of both civility and dining to a region widely regarded in the era as "the Wild West".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Harvey_Company
It is a matter of record that when a bench-clearing brawl erupted at one of the AT&SF restaurants, the manager yelled, “Gentlemen, there are ladies present!” - and in the time it takes to say so, the entire disputation stopped. Just like that.
[A similar scenario happens in Alita: Battle Angel - “Stop! Or
no more free repairs!!” - but I cannot imagine it to be more than coincidence.]
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In characteristic fashion, I became aware of the existence of the Harvey Girls from the 1946 musical of the same name! (I bear it something of a grudge these days: they dubbed Angela Lansbury's singing voice. Who does that?)
Re: The Peace of Harvey
Jack Warner. He was your classic cigar-chewing, bottom-line myopic, “I don’t want it good, I want it by 3 pm” movie mogul, and if you know anything about what went on before and during production of My Fair Lady, you’re seeing that in action. All he cared was, what made money yesterday was good enough today. “Audrey who? - Dub her!” and workhorse Marni Nixon did what she did to Deborah Kerr, who’d performed The King and I on Broadway, but so what? That ain’t the movie business! Meanwhile Miss Hepburn stormed off the set in a towering rage - for which she apologized the next day. (Jeremy Brett as ‘Freddy Eynsford-Hill’ got dubbed too. He shrugged.)
But that merely answers your question: The Harvey Girls was MGM. So as Gilda Radner would say,
“… Never mind!”
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Musicals were one of the few kinds of movie I grew up watching a lot of. It was more of a cry of existential outrage than an actual lack of information. But I still begrudge it.
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1776 ? I grew up with that one; I was nearly cast in a local production, either as Andrew MacNair (“S-wee-eet Jeezus!”) or the Rev John Witherspoon, of New Jersey. Didn’t make it, but O well. I’ve done other productions.
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Extremely 1776. A line from it—from the real-life letters of John and Abigail Adams, but we had both encountered it first in the musical—was part of my marriage ceremony with
Re: Musicals
About that - Poor Richard’s Almanack is public domain and well worth thumbing through, if you never have.
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This is completely understandable.
http://www.revolutionarywarjournal.com/a-drunken-canting-lying-hypocritical-rabble/
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> any chance of her character as a sex worker
- can it still be read between the lines? I’m thinking of Dead End (1937) where gangster Humphrey Bogart says to the somewhat garishly but fully dressed Sylvia Sydney, “Couldn’t you get a respectable job?”
“Couldn’t you?” she fires back, on target. There was no need to be more specific.
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In this case, I don't think so. I've also seen post-Code films where it was utterly unambiguous, but The Girl from 10th Avenue really seems to run with the idea that Miriam happens not to be one, which doesn't stop richer men (and women) from treating her as though her class and her gender make her inherently purchasable. It's a different valence, but it still has something to say, and I like it.
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It’s also one of the lines declaimed by Lord John Whorfin in Buckaroo Banzai (1984)!
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Oh, my God, you're right. "Character is what you are in the dark." No wonder it sounded familiar. I'd just chalked it up to Borzage's filmography.
“Sloop John Whorfin”
He also said, “I feel so broke up - I want to go home!”
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I was absolutely not expecting it to be as good as it was the first time I saw it. The third-act speech went off like a rocket. I'm really fond of it!
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How about the earlier versions of the film--have you seen any of them? I'd kind of like to see it with the Miriam character as an actual prostitute.
(I liked Geoffrey's parody of the wedding, too.)
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It looks like it's at least on DVD, as opposed to Daughter of Shanghai which seems totally unavailable and I just want to screen for everyone I know. I'm glad you could see a clip from it!
How about the earlier versions of the film--have you seen any of them? I'd kind of like to see it with the Miriam character as an actual prostitute.
I've never seen any of the earlier versions—two are silents and one's an early part-talkie—and I have no idea of their availability except that the earliest appears to be a lost film. I could almost certainly track down a copy of the original play and see about its relationship to The Girl from 10th Avenue, though.
(I liked Geoffrey's parody of the wedding, too.)
It's one of the romances where you can actually see why they like each other—as opposed to they just got stuck together by the plot. And that means you want them to work it out, which means you want Geoffrey to extract his head from his class consciousness.
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Isn’t that annoying? Far and away the best production I’ve ever seen of M Hart’s You Can’t Take It With You aired once in AD 1979 and then vanished. Hello, videotape? Nope.
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It's still in the TCM buffer if you have access to that! Just in the last month, movies seem to be staying longer than their customary seven days. I have no idea if it's a permanent change or a glitch, but you might as well take advantage of it.
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I'm really fond of it! It's not a big movie, but they don't all need to be.
The plot reminds me of Friday's Child, one of my favorite of Georgette Heyer's Regency romances, if only its heroine had been about a thousand times more intelligent and self-possessed.
I haven't read that one! Talk to me about it?
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For one thing, it’s one of the few romance novels I’ve seen where the guy is the main viewpoint character, not the girl. Whom I liked.
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Viscount Sheringham is very rich, very young, very entitled, and very dumb. The novel opens with him proposing to his childhood friend/current belle of the ball, and her roundly turning him down, because she realizes he's not in love with her and is only proposing because it's the popular thing to do. Nonetheless Sherry is extremely upset (see: very dumb) and on his way storming out of the neighborhood, he happens to run into Hero, a young woman who is some sort of distant relation of his and is very poor. She's being used as a Cinderella and is destined to become a governess, at best, despite her not being any good at any academic subject. Sheringham proposes to her, in what is explicitly meant to be a marriage of convenience (no sex, they can each take lovers) to both rescue her from this fate and get back at the popular girl. They get married that day, before any of the families can stop them. Hero is also very dumb, and very innocent, and very unaware of how upper class society works, so she proceeds to get into a series of outrageous scandals (gambling too much money at cards, racing horses, making friends with Sherry's former mistress, etc). Eventually she feels so bad about causing Sherry trouble that she decides to run away and go into hiding so that he's free to marry someone else. Instead, of course, this only causes Sherry to realize he's actually in love with Hero now, and they end up happily together.
It's quite possibly my favorite Heyer, because it's very, very funny (I haven't even mentioned all the utterly ridiculous side characters) and I find the romance to be more believable and to have more chemistry than most of her couples. On the other hand, Hero is just so extremely dumb that even reading it feels like an act of anti-feminism, which makes me reluctant to recommend it to anyone. Which is why I love that The Girl from 10th Avenue seems like a similar plot, but with a stronger heroine! Friday's Child apparently came out in 1944; I wonder if Heyer saw The Girl from 10th Avenue or one of the other versions.
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I see how you got here! And yes, I'm pretty sure that Miriam has a lot more sense than Hero. Now I'm curious, too. (So many of Heyer's novels were always written later than I think.)
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I hope so! It feels like the sort of thing you should be able to find in the last local video shop.