MissGoddess wrote:Gilbert is the main attraction for me. I hope he sticks around for most of the movie? I can't say I'm much of a fan of Tony Curtis, but I will give it a try.
GR has a very large role second only to Tony Curtis in the film.
FYI:
Two
Gilbert Roland films are on the TCM Schedule tonight (Nov. 13) as part of the Constance Bennett Star of the Month celebration.
OUR BETTERS (1933-George Cukor) at 9:45pm (ET): Based on a 1917 W. Somerset Maugham play, this is a somewhat creaky satirical critique of society made in the midst of The Great Depression. This film tries for a bittersweet brittleness but there are almost no likable characters among the jaded British aristocrats whose idleness and curdled lives center around card games, meals, and long weekends at each others stately homes while engaging in discreet liaisons.
Constance Bennett plays a wealthy American woman married to an English aristocrat who only wed her for her money. Her revenge? Dissipation, general snarkiness, a lavish wardrobe, and a boy toy (
Gilbert Roland, who barely speaks). This film is noteworthy for the atmosphere of general pre-code naughtiness, but it goes one step further with the specific presence of one of the most flamboyantly portrayed gay characters seen on the screen up to that time. The uncredited
Tyrell Davis appears in the role of the mincing dance master Ernest, whose arrival near the last part of the movie shakes up the stale air a bit, but I have never fully understood if Maugham or Cukor meant this character to be the only person who pierces the hypocrisy around him with his outlandish truth-telling or if he is meant to be seen as a satirical by-product of this decadent atmosphere. In either case,
Davis takes the kind of role owned by
Edward Everett Horton and
Franklin Pangborn to an extreme that would disappear as soon as the production code began to pinch in the following year. If only classic Hollywood had found the stereotypical portrayals of other nationalities and races as offensive as one lipstick-wearing guy--but then, that would probably have led to no Hattie McDaniel, no Benson Fong or even any Gilbert Roland.
Above: Violet Kemble Cooper with Tyrell Davis in Our Betters (1933).
*MILD SPOILER ALERT*
AFTER TONIGHT (1932-George Archainbaud) at 3:15am (ET):
I don't know if anyone else saw this movie when it aired earlier this year, but I found it charming, even if it was another version of Dietrich's
Dishonored (1931) and Garbo's
Mata Hari (1931) dealing with the tangled private lives of female spies during WWI.
Bennett, playing a spy for the Russians, meets undercover Austrian intelligence agent
Gilbert Roland in a Belgian train station as frantic people around them try to go home just as the war has broken out in 1914. The two have enormous chemistry in every scene and
Roland is gentle and funny as he charms the more assertive
Constance, who seems much warmer and human than she usually appears on screen (at least to me). I particularly liked their mutual wariness in this opening sequence and their subsequent train trip. As a spy,
Bennett is clever, resourceful, in constant danger, and increasingly saddened by her duties, esp. after she is compelled to become a nurse near the front lines. A chance meeting with
Roland leads to the sweet, brief romance that we have pictured earlier in this thread. There is some suspense as
Roland and his cohorts investigate leaks in the area, leading eventually to
Bennett's identification as a suspect. The ending, which feels somewhat rushed, is amusingly coy, and it also takes place in another train station. Watching this movie it is easy to believe that this was the film set where Gilbert Roland and Constance Bennett fell in love for real.
Together in
After Tonight (1933)
