![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
I'm sorry, but this asthmatic feline at 622 North Mason Avenue demands my immediate attention
I know it is the job of a reviewer to review the art that exists, not the art the reviewer would personally have preferred, but I like the protagonists of Gallant Lady (1934) so much, I wish I could offer them asylum into a plot that makes one damn lick of sense.
The premise is a pre-Code crackerjack: after her secret fiancé of an aviator dies in a fiery crash before her eyes, grief-stunned Sally Wyndham (Ann Harding) meets cute with struck-off doctor Dan Pritchard (Clive Brook) when he rescues her from being run in for solicitation in a public park, hustling her out of the self-righteous reach of the police with the gallantly brazen icebreaker of "There you are, honey! Sorry I'm late." Over a cup of coffee on her side and a bottle of gin on his, we learn that he's fresh out of prison for assisting the suicide of a terminal patient and she's pregnant with the child she never told her lover about, not wanting to hold him with anything but his own feelings. "You're a pretty swell fellow," Dan tells her without a hint of his usual irony, gently closing the door before this sad, straightforward girl can vanish into the night and her own destruction. More than a little chokily to her scruffy Samaritan, Sally returns, "Shouldn't be surprised if you're pretty swell yourself." Eight months later in the maternity ward, they make an adorable nativity, at least if the viewer ignores the anguished intensity of Sally's mother love and the concern hovering underneath Dan's heartiness. An adoption has been arranged with a trustworthy, well-heeled couple, but Sally desperately doesn't want to lose her son, she just can't see any other way not to "let him pay all his life for something that happened to [her]." Watching Dan's face as his friend mourns over her child, I wondered for a serious second if he was just going to propose last-minute for the sake of the baby and we'd get one of those complicated marriage-of-convenience romances, which I have been known to enjoy. Instead, the adoption goes forward despite Sally's heartbreak and a neat little montage highlights us through the first five years in the life of Deedy Lawrence (Dickie Moore) and by the time we catch up with Sally as a rising interior decorator and Dan as a drifting tramp sailor, Gallant Lady is ready to launch itself into the outer reaches of disbelief with a melodrama of mother coincidentally reunited with child and determined to remain in his life at all costs, even if that means seducing now-widowed Phil Lawrence (Otto Kruger) away from his self-centered fiancée Cynthia Haddon (Betty Lawford), keeping her maternal identity under wraps all the while, of course. Dan's skepticism on hearing this plan may be permitted to stand in for the audience's: "He hasn't proposed to you, you don't love him, and you're going to marry him. That'll be something."
I appreciate narrative subversion as much as the next person, but there's subversion and then there's silliness and everything about this amorally soaped-up plot would work so much better if the film weren't scrambling overtime through its own twists to keep the obvious pairing of Dan and Sally apart. It's not just that I like the actors, although I do. Harding was unfashionably beautiful for the pre-Code era, with a clearwater classical face and famously un-bobbed hair which could sometimes be seen in a dazzling barley-fall to her waist; her corresponding directness as a performer could carry off roles that might otherwise have flattened into noble resignation or naïveté. Often cast as patent leather heroes—he had the thick dark hair and the neatly braced bones for it—Brook actually worked best after a few scuffs and hard knocks, especially once the talkies could take advantage of his dry voice sounding straight out of Berkeley Square while the rest of him looked like he'd just been scraped up off the Bowery. Here they are playing emotionally wounded, socially stigmatized, sensitive and intelligent adults and their chemistry looks like a pleasantly foregone slow burn, complicated more by their insecurities and defenses than by external obstacles. Dan pulls strings with an old girlfriend to find gainful employment for Sally, she kisses his hand when he starts to shake it goodbye, he fucks awkwardly off to sea rather than face her gratitude, and yet even after five years without so much as a postcard she flies into his arms with a cry of "Dan, darling!" as soon as he steps through the door of her showroom, Depression-joking off his rough appearance, "Hey, lady, spare a dime?" Because she would miss him if he were off doctoring cows in the Argentine, he does his best to reinvent himself as a veterinarian on Park Avenue, but even after he's wiped out into drunken vagrancy again, she tells him as plainly as everything else between them, "After all, you know, you and Deedy are my whole world." He never admits the same in words, but he watches her like a compass needle to north. They keep parting and rejoining and they never look like they've lost a day. You just want one of them to realize it's mutual.
If the screenplay wanted to throw a spanner into this elliptical solidarity, it could have done so honestly. Dan drinks too much by even the pixilated standards of 1930's Hollywood; he's an angel when present in person and he's dead air when he's not. "Didn't you receive a letter from Singapore?" he asks with the mildest pretense of dismay on their reunion. "Did you write a letter from Singapore?" Sally rejoins with equally wide-eyed innocence. Promptly and unblushingly, he answers, "No, I didn't. I'll write one next time I go there." It's charmingly treated, but it could easily be a red flag. Meanwhile, although I find it a little disingenuous that the film defers any discussion of marriage until the third act—the characters obviously live together for the duration of Sally's pregnancy, but since it would forestall the tear-jerking adoption if they just tied the knot, apparently all that time the question never comes up—it is true that once the film has established Sally's resolve to mother her firstborn, she really can't do it without marrying the kid's legal father, which Dan most emphatically is not. Had the film at any point addressed these objections, I wouldn't be half as annoyed with it as I am. Instead it doesn't seem to notice they exist and busies itself to compensate with a lot of extraneous nonsense that undercuts the characters and clutters the plot. I could not for the life of me tell you what Count Mario Carnini (Tullio Carminati) is doing in this movie besides singing arias, which he does quite well, but their effect on the action is nil. His romantic pursuit of Sally neither threatens her relationship with Dan nor plays into her designs on Phil; he does not pair off with her mentor Maria Sherwood (Janet Beecher) despite the older woman's good-natured efforts to rebound onto him; he does not even contribute to Sally's rediscovery of her son, since it is entirely on her own recognizance that she goes to Paris on business and meets a tow-headed little stamp collector pestering the front desk clerk for letters. When he's last seen calling on the superficial Cynthia, it registers less as a zinger than an afterthought, as if the film belatedly realized it had to do something with him. At least his presence only wastes the audience's time. Other developments just insult their intelligence. "Do you mean to say you're so terribly dense that you don't know Dan Pritchard is in love with you?" Maria demands at one point, effectively ventriloquizing the audience's frustration. It's a valiant try, but since any acknowledged attraction would stop the melodrama cold in its tracks, Sally is simply not permitted to believe it: "I wish you'd stop joking about it, Maria. I adore Dan—I'd die for him—but you just don't know what you're talking about." Even more egregious is the treatment of Dan's proposal, which I can liken only to watching an idiot ball assume galactic proportions. A despondent Sally has just had her plan of cold-blooded marriage shredded up one side and down the other by an unusually sober and actually appalled Dan, who softens as he registers her slumped silence and comes to sit by her, rolling his empty glass back and forth between his hands in the first nervous gesture we've seen from this bruised, facetious man. "I don't say you shouldn't marry," he begins, as briskly as if it had nothing to do with him, "I think you should," but not a loveless union with a man she's already lying to. "You ought to marry some fellow who'd love you. Some fellow who'd care for you for yourself. Someone who'd adore you . . . How would I do?" For all that Dan's feelings have been as visible as Manhattan from space, the sudden diffident delivery of the question at last is almost unbearably touching, charged with as much self-doubt as sexual tension—it deserves an answer in kind, even a regretfully crushing rejection or a self-destructive doubling down. Short of one of the characters dropping dead, I don't think I could have imagined a bigger cop-out than Sally failing to hear the entire speech because she was thinking about her son. "Oh, I'm so sorry, Dan—what was it?" I didn't blame him for answering by pouring himself a drink. If I were still allowed alcohol, I'd have done a shot with him. After that I couldn't quite care about the three-cornered shenanigans of Cynthia and Phil and Sally, her genuine bonding with her child and her feigned bonding with her child's father that abruptly and inconveniently metastasizes into the real thing, God knows how since Harding has less chemistry of any sort with Kruger than she does with Moore. When the film jolts to life again, it's only because Dan is passing through it with his patched suitcase and his vagabond's cigarettes, effectively calling out the idiot katamari the plot has turned into with an explosive "I'm fed up with people not doing what they want to do!" If Sally wants to marry Phil and raise her secret child with him, she should go ahead and do it and no phony qualms about whether it was only all right so long as she didn't love him. As for himself, he declares, "I'm going to do the things I want to do. I like bumming around and I like to get drunk. And there's something else I've wanted to do for a very long time . . ." It is, of course, kiss Sally, which he does as seriously and sincerely as the audience has always known he would, before exiting her life for likely the final time with a gentle press of her shoulder and the flippant scene-stealing of the best sardonic tragedies: "Write you from Singapore! Goodbye!"
And yes, it's wonderful—and echt pre-Code—to see a woman get pregnant out of wedlock and end the movie with everything she ever longed for, her own child and a husband who loves her and whom she even loves, but I am left feeling as though in order to achieve its scripted end, the plot steamrolled the much wider field of possibilities it started with. It's not as though it just improvised itself into a corner. The titles credit a screenplay to Sam Mintz and a story to Gilbert Emery and Franc Rhodes; it was directed for Twentieth Century by Gregory La Cava, who may have encouraged his actors to ad-lib as on the sets of My Man Godfrey (1936) and Stage Door (1937), but then somebody had to cut the thing together and surely continuity has a narrative as well as a visual component? The final effect is so confused, I couldn't even tell if the ending was supposed to be bittersweet. I still don't regret seeing it for Harding and Brook, but you understand my desire for some kind of AU. It exists on DVD if anyone wishes to make the attempt or just commiserate. If nothing else, I feel confident stating that Dan will win any modern viewer's heart the moment he disclaims his original kindness to Sally, "There's nothing personal in my attitude, I merely hate policemen." This something brought to you by my sensical backers at Patreon.
The premise is a pre-Code crackerjack: after her secret fiancé of an aviator dies in a fiery crash before her eyes, grief-stunned Sally Wyndham (Ann Harding) meets cute with struck-off doctor Dan Pritchard (Clive Brook) when he rescues her from being run in for solicitation in a public park, hustling her out of the self-righteous reach of the police with the gallantly brazen icebreaker of "There you are, honey! Sorry I'm late." Over a cup of coffee on her side and a bottle of gin on his, we learn that he's fresh out of prison for assisting the suicide of a terminal patient and she's pregnant with the child she never told her lover about, not wanting to hold him with anything but his own feelings. "You're a pretty swell fellow," Dan tells her without a hint of his usual irony, gently closing the door before this sad, straightforward girl can vanish into the night and her own destruction. More than a little chokily to her scruffy Samaritan, Sally returns, "Shouldn't be surprised if you're pretty swell yourself." Eight months later in the maternity ward, they make an adorable nativity, at least if the viewer ignores the anguished intensity of Sally's mother love and the concern hovering underneath Dan's heartiness. An adoption has been arranged with a trustworthy, well-heeled couple, but Sally desperately doesn't want to lose her son, she just can't see any other way not to "let him pay all his life for something that happened to [her]." Watching Dan's face as his friend mourns over her child, I wondered for a serious second if he was just going to propose last-minute for the sake of the baby and we'd get one of those complicated marriage-of-convenience romances, which I have been known to enjoy. Instead, the adoption goes forward despite Sally's heartbreak and a neat little montage highlights us through the first five years in the life of Deedy Lawrence (Dickie Moore) and by the time we catch up with Sally as a rising interior decorator and Dan as a drifting tramp sailor, Gallant Lady is ready to launch itself into the outer reaches of disbelief with a melodrama of mother coincidentally reunited with child and determined to remain in his life at all costs, even if that means seducing now-widowed Phil Lawrence (Otto Kruger) away from his self-centered fiancée Cynthia Haddon (Betty Lawford), keeping her maternal identity under wraps all the while, of course. Dan's skepticism on hearing this plan may be permitted to stand in for the audience's: "He hasn't proposed to you, you don't love him, and you're going to marry him. That'll be something."
I appreciate narrative subversion as much as the next person, but there's subversion and then there's silliness and everything about this amorally soaped-up plot would work so much better if the film weren't scrambling overtime through its own twists to keep the obvious pairing of Dan and Sally apart. It's not just that I like the actors, although I do. Harding was unfashionably beautiful for the pre-Code era, with a clearwater classical face and famously un-bobbed hair which could sometimes be seen in a dazzling barley-fall to her waist; her corresponding directness as a performer could carry off roles that might otherwise have flattened into noble resignation or naïveté. Often cast as patent leather heroes—he had the thick dark hair and the neatly braced bones for it—Brook actually worked best after a few scuffs and hard knocks, especially once the talkies could take advantage of his dry voice sounding straight out of Berkeley Square while the rest of him looked like he'd just been scraped up off the Bowery. Here they are playing emotionally wounded, socially stigmatized, sensitive and intelligent adults and their chemistry looks like a pleasantly foregone slow burn, complicated more by their insecurities and defenses than by external obstacles. Dan pulls strings with an old girlfriend to find gainful employment for Sally, she kisses his hand when he starts to shake it goodbye, he fucks awkwardly off to sea rather than face her gratitude, and yet even after five years without so much as a postcard she flies into his arms with a cry of "Dan, darling!" as soon as he steps through the door of her showroom, Depression-joking off his rough appearance, "Hey, lady, spare a dime?" Because she would miss him if he were off doctoring cows in the Argentine, he does his best to reinvent himself as a veterinarian on Park Avenue, but even after he's wiped out into drunken vagrancy again, she tells him as plainly as everything else between them, "After all, you know, you and Deedy are my whole world." He never admits the same in words, but he watches her like a compass needle to north. They keep parting and rejoining and they never look like they've lost a day. You just want one of them to realize it's mutual.
If the screenplay wanted to throw a spanner into this elliptical solidarity, it could have done so honestly. Dan drinks too much by even the pixilated standards of 1930's Hollywood; he's an angel when present in person and he's dead air when he's not. "Didn't you receive a letter from Singapore?" he asks with the mildest pretense of dismay on their reunion. "Did you write a letter from Singapore?" Sally rejoins with equally wide-eyed innocence. Promptly and unblushingly, he answers, "No, I didn't. I'll write one next time I go there." It's charmingly treated, but it could easily be a red flag. Meanwhile, although I find it a little disingenuous that the film defers any discussion of marriage until the third act—the characters obviously live together for the duration of Sally's pregnancy, but since it would forestall the tear-jerking adoption if they just tied the knot, apparently all that time the question never comes up—it is true that once the film has established Sally's resolve to mother her firstborn, she really can't do it without marrying the kid's legal father, which Dan most emphatically is not. Had the film at any point addressed these objections, I wouldn't be half as annoyed with it as I am. Instead it doesn't seem to notice they exist and busies itself to compensate with a lot of extraneous nonsense that undercuts the characters and clutters the plot. I could not for the life of me tell you what Count Mario Carnini (Tullio Carminati) is doing in this movie besides singing arias, which he does quite well, but their effect on the action is nil. His romantic pursuit of Sally neither threatens her relationship with Dan nor plays into her designs on Phil; he does not pair off with her mentor Maria Sherwood (Janet Beecher) despite the older woman's good-natured efforts to rebound onto him; he does not even contribute to Sally's rediscovery of her son, since it is entirely on her own recognizance that she goes to Paris on business and meets a tow-headed little stamp collector pestering the front desk clerk for letters. When he's last seen calling on the superficial Cynthia, it registers less as a zinger than an afterthought, as if the film belatedly realized it had to do something with him. At least his presence only wastes the audience's time. Other developments just insult their intelligence. "Do you mean to say you're so terribly dense that you don't know Dan Pritchard is in love with you?" Maria demands at one point, effectively ventriloquizing the audience's frustration. It's a valiant try, but since any acknowledged attraction would stop the melodrama cold in its tracks, Sally is simply not permitted to believe it: "I wish you'd stop joking about it, Maria. I adore Dan—I'd die for him—but you just don't know what you're talking about." Even more egregious is the treatment of Dan's proposal, which I can liken only to watching an idiot ball assume galactic proportions. A despondent Sally has just had her plan of cold-blooded marriage shredded up one side and down the other by an unusually sober and actually appalled Dan, who softens as he registers her slumped silence and comes to sit by her, rolling his empty glass back and forth between his hands in the first nervous gesture we've seen from this bruised, facetious man. "I don't say you shouldn't marry," he begins, as briskly as if it had nothing to do with him, "I think you should," but not a loveless union with a man she's already lying to. "You ought to marry some fellow who'd love you. Some fellow who'd care for you for yourself. Someone who'd adore you . . . How would I do?" For all that Dan's feelings have been as visible as Manhattan from space, the sudden diffident delivery of the question at last is almost unbearably touching, charged with as much self-doubt as sexual tension—it deserves an answer in kind, even a regretfully crushing rejection or a self-destructive doubling down. Short of one of the characters dropping dead, I don't think I could have imagined a bigger cop-out than Sally failing to hear the entire speech because she was thinking about her son. "Oh, I'm so sorry, Dan—what was it?" I didn't blame him for answering by pouring himself a drink. If I were still allowed alcohol, I'd have done a shot with him. After that I couldn't quite care about the three-cornered shenanigans of Cynthia and Phil and Sally, her genuine bonding with her child and her feigned bonding with her child's father that abruptly and inconveniently metastasizes into the real thing, God knows how since Harding has less chemistry of any sort with Kruger than she does with Moore. When the film jolts to life again, it's only because Dan is passing through it with his patched suitcase and his vagabond's cigarettes, effectively calling out the idiot katamari the plot has turned into with an explosive "I'm fed up with people not doing what they want to do!" If Sally wants to marry Phil and raise her secret child with him, she should go ahead and do it and no phony qualms about whether it was only all right so long as she didn't love him. As for himself, he declares, "I'm going to do the things I want to do. I like bumming around and I like to get drunk. And there's something else I've wanted to do for a very long time . . ." It is, of course, kiss Sally, which he does as seriously and sincerely as the audience has always known he would, before exiting her life for likely the final time with a gentle press of her shoulder and the flippant scene-stealing of the best sardonic tragedies: "Write you from Singapore! Goodbye!"
And yes, it's wonderful—and echt pre-Code—to see a woman get pregnant out of wedlock and end the movie with everything she ever longed for, her own child and a husband who loves her and whom she even loves, but I am left feeling as though in order to achieve its scripted end, the plot steamrolled the much wider field of possibilities it started with. It's not as though it just improvised itself into a corner. The titles credit a screenplay to Sam Mintz and a story to Gilbert Emery and Franc Rhodes; it was directed for Twentieth Century by Gregory La Cava, who may have encouraged his actors to ad-lib as on the sets of My Man Godfrey (1936) and Stage Door (1937), but then somebody had to cut the thing together and surely continuity has a narrative as well as a visual component? The final effect is so confused, I couldn't even tell if the ending was supposed to be bittersweet. I still don't regret seeing it for Harding and Brook, but you understand my desire for some kind of AU. It exists on DVD if anyone wishes to make the attempt or just commiserate. If nothing else, I feel confident stating that Dan will win any modern viewer's heart the moment he disclaims his original kindness to Sally, "There's nothing personal in my attitude, I merely hate policemen." This something brought to you by my sensical backers at Patreon.
no subject
I have found so far in my limited old film watching that Clive Brook is always one way to get your money's worth in entertainment value if nothing else. I'll have to look out for this one as well. (Have you ever seen The Ware Case? That was where I first met him. It is a film that seems to want to be at least three contradictory things but was also somehow, largely due to Clive Brook, still highly entertaining & he's been fun in the two other things I've seen him in as well.)
no subject
I have not, but I will look for it now! I saw him first in Underworld (1927), apologies for the twelve-year-old writeup when I knew much less about film. He's magnificent in On Approval (1944). What are the other two things you've seen him in?
no subject
Anyway, all four can be summed up as "this probably isn't good but it had CLive Brook in it and I enjoyed it muchly. Except for that terrible stinker of a last line in Lonely Road that I will DEFINITELY be pressing the stop button before I get to next time." XD)
no subject
I respect this approach!
(I will also look for Return to Yesterday.)
no subject
She... ends up with the boy's adoptive dad? And not Dan? WHAT???
That's TERRIBLE.
"Do you mean to say you're so terribly dense that you don't know Dan Pritchard is in love with you?" Maria demands at one point, effectively ventriloquizing the audience's frustration. --I literally laughed out loud.
Mind-boggling. It's like the director and team were as breathtakingly obtuse as they've made Sally be. It's like they have all the ingredients for a beautiful cake but manage to mix them up into something awful instead.
Here's my rewrite: while Sally's ineffectively pursuing Phil, Dan makes himself genuinely (i.e., without scheming intent) a friend of Phil's. Then Phil gets sick, elects Dan as the guardian in case of his own death, and BOOM. Path's clear, baby, now you can marry the guy you actually love!
no subject
I KNOW.
It's like they have all the ingredients for a beautiful cake but manage to mix them up into something awful instead.
Here's my rewrite: while Sally's ineffectively pursuing Phil, Dan makes himself genuinely (i.e., without scheming intent) a friend of Phil's. Then Phil gets sick, elects Dan as the guardian in case of his own death, and BOOM. Path's clear, baby, now you can marry the guy you actually love!
Phil and Dan actually know one another! They were friends in college! Hard luck on Phil, but I think I'll subscribe to your newsletter. It would be just as melodramatic without making me want to throw a boot through the screen.
no subject
it's stupid, but it's stupid in keeping with human psychology, not narrative contrivance --I feel like this is a distinction that more writers and filmmakers need to understand.
Have you happened to see this most recent Sarah Cooper Trump lip sync? The way she makes Trump look troubled when he realizes he's just said experience is good but finds himself talking about talent is I imagine how the film creators looked when they realized the box they put themselves in, and, like T*rump, they failed to get themselves out of it.
no subject
no subject
no subject
My Jewish mother hates that book. I think she has since it was published. We only had a copy in the house because, ironically, some well-meaning friend or family member gave it to me. I've been able to tell her in recent years that she was ahead of the curve!
no subject
OH MY GOD THERE WAS A REMAKE AND IT DIDN'T FIX THE ENDING EITHER.
WELL I'M NOT WATCHING THAT.
no subject
no subject
Especially since it looks like this version leaned into the bittersweetness of the ending, and who needs that?
no subject
And by your account the scripts establishes this right from the start with her fear that telling her fiancé of her pregnancy would amount to emotional blackmail, and his downplaying of her rescue as merely due to his dislike for cops. I can easily believe that both are the kind of people so worried they’ll put others on the spot that they end up circling around and playing head-games anyway.
I can see why the subsequent plot would lead to screams of frustration.
Given that apparently a lot of pre-Code scripts were developed by remixing the plots of two or three earlier movies with good box-office records, perhaps this was an example of that method failing; or alternately, perhaps the script did not anticipate the on-screen chemistry between Harding and Brook, and on the page his character would indeed have worked as the “platonic friend” role.
no subject
Exactly! And while I prefer that characters in such situations eventually come to their senses, I can accept that sometimes people realistically fail to. But then the film should commit to the near-miss. Instead—
I can see why the subsequent plot would lead to screams of frustration.
—there was a lot of screaming.
Given that apparently a lot of pre-Code scripts were developed by remixing the plots of two or three earlier movies with good box-office records, perhaps this was an example of that method failing
I could believe that. There are a ton of pre-Code movies about unwed mothers. What I hadn't realized was the number of pre- and even post-Code movies where the premise is "unwed or otherwise compromised mother reunited with unknowing child." (People were remaking Madame X as late as 1981 with Tuesday Weld. I don't get the impression that that version is well-regarded, but I am fascinated by its existence as well as its supporting cast of Jeremy Brett, Len Cariou, Jerry Stiller, and Eleanor Parker, because I don't think of any of those people as inhabiting the same cinematic universe.) I feel this may have finally answered that question I had about where all the heroic parental fuck-ups go when they're female, but one trope should not make a genre and, as demonstrated by Gallant Lady, it's not bulletproof anyway.
(I wish Bangkok Hilton (1989) were not so low-key but unavoidably racist in the way where only the white characters in a narrative are real because otherwise it's got the most successfully idtastic variation of that plot—father-daughter in its case—that I've encountered in any narrative medium, including Barbara Hambly's Dead and Buried (2010). I wanted to write about it back in 2012 and never managed. It's like a three-way between a war movie, a prison movie, and a Shakespearean late romance. I watched it for Denholm Elliott, but it was Nicole Kidman's breakout role and it deserved to be.)
or alternately, perhaps the script did not anticipate the on-screen chemistry between Harding and Brook, and on the page his character would indeed have worked as the “platonic friend” role.
The problem with Dan as a Sydney Carton figure is that there's just too much in the text that's mutual for me to credit an original conception of one-sided pining, although I agree that Harding and Brook would have pulled that interpretation off its axis no matter what. (
no subject
no subject
I am very seriously considering trying to rewatch The Animal Kingdom (1932) or When Ladies Meet (1933) as an antidote.
I'm pretty sure I have never seen Otto Kruger have romantic chemistry with anyone in a film. That's really not what he's usually there for!
I had forgotten until I looked him up just now that he's the psychiatrist in Dracula's Daughter (1936) whose relationship with Marguerite Churchill is so unbelievable that I didn't even bother to record their names when I wrote up the film, merely registering them as "the especially frustrating kind of obligatory het couple." He was much better in Saboteur (1942).
no subject
I also had forgotten Kruger was in Dracula's Daughter, and I've seen it many times! Which just shows how unbelievable he is in a romantic context.