SADIE MCKEE
1934
Directed by Clarence Brown
Written by John Meehan, Bess Meredyth, E.A. Woolf, Carey Wilson, and Vicki Baum (based on "Pretty Sadie McKee" by Viña Delmar)
Starting from the advent of his tenure with Flesh and the Devil, I'm not sure I'd be willing to hear any argument that Clarence Brown wasn't Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's best director during the late silent and early sound eras—so, not because it constitutes any exhaustive list, but because they're important precursors to today's subject, just consider, for instance, his two previous collaborations with Joan Crawford in Possessed and Letty Lynton—and if we zoom out far enough, I'd barely be willing to hear an argument that Clarence Brown wasn't MGM's (or Hollywood's) best director for the entirety of that nebulously-defined Golden Age of American Cinema. But there's kind of a reason this retrospective on the filmmaker has lain fallow for, how's that, about a year now (the overriding reason, of course, is "I am lazy, ill-disciplined, and distractible"), for after 1933, Brown hit an artistic slump.
Some of this is attributable to his disappointment over the muted reception afforded to his biggest passion project of the 1930s, Night Flight, and maybe that weakened his commitment to servicing his studio with the same gusto he'd demonstrated after the (much more serious) boondoggle of his biggest passion project of the 1920s, The Trail of '98. It probably didn't help that the Production Code was in the process of growing its teeth, for, despite his own personal conservatism, if you only went by his movies into 1934, you'd have to agree that Brown was pretty pre-Code kind of guy. Or maybe it was all a fluke, and nobody hits all the time. (Maybe it was when he did get to do his own thing in the later 1930s, I plain-and-simply like it less.) It's also not like he became pure poison: there'll be several good movies, and one truly great one (and only one terrible one), before Brown finds a new and even more rewarding groove in the 1940s. (Then again, that great one? It was the sole movie he didn't make for MGM between 1926 and his retirement in 1953.) Nevertheless, at least in comparison to what came before or after, we have to say Brown's mid-to-late 30s sucks: by my accounting, it was eleven years after 1933 before Brown managed two legitimately good movies in a row again.
Yet for all that his first film after Night Flight, and first film of 1934—one Sadie McKee—represents the beginning of a new, worse phase (or, with only a little charity, the end of the previous, better phase) in Brown's filmography, I don't know if you'd realize this without the benefit of years' worth of hindsight. It's not his best movie, nor even appreciably close, but I persist in finding it perhaps the most characteristic of Brown's films, the one where Brown's approach is most visible with the least distracting from seeing how it works, the one I would point to most readily to explain whatever it is that constitutes such a thing as a "Clarence Brown touch." It is, of course, what it looks like, a Joan Crawford star vehicle, and that's even part of the Brown of it: that means it's a women's melodrama, a genre that Brown had proven his talent in over and over despite basically only having two stories between the more than a half-dozen women's picture masterpieces and near-masterpieces he'd made, and I'd conceivably hold it up as Crawford's most characteristic movie, too.
So to open we find ourselves at the gates of a splendid mansion, the abode of the magnificent Aldersons, where a wealthy visitor spies one Sadie McKee (Crawford) in her sharp modern girl dress and declares her a natural aristocrat, only to learn she's the daughter of house's cook (Helen Ware) and one of the Aldersons' domestics herself. The Aldersons seem nice enough initially, at least as represented by their lawyer son Michael (soon-to-be Mr. Crawford, Franchot Tone), who chums around with the help in the kitchen and is very excited to see Sadie for the first time in years, immediately recapturing their youthful playfulness when they were both just kids in a house rather than master and servant. There is the glimmer in Mrs. McKee of a social-climbing dream for her daughter, but Sadie is much more taken with her actual boyfriend, Tommy Wallace (Gene Raymond), likewise an employee of the Aldersons at one of their various industrial concerns. Unfortunately, Tommy is under a dark cloud—he's suspected of embezzlement—and, indeed, Tommy's malfeasance is the topic of dinner conversation at the Alderson table, which Sadie stomachs for about sixty seconds before unloading all her resentments in Michael's lap directly and storming off in lieu of a formal resignation.
Bidding farewell to Tommy at the train station as he prepares to evade his troubles by migrating to New York City, she impulsively hops aboard herself, and she reckons there's not much reason for them to not get married now, and Tommy is seemingly quite enthusiastic about this, at least up to the point that she puts out on their wedding eve—it's hard, anyway, not to interpret the editing this way—though he fails to show up to their poor person nuptials at the clerk's office the following afternoon, having been enticed to become the boytoy and stage partner of their neighbor, Dolly Merrick (Esther Ralston), on the basis of singing a nice, soothing Arthur Freed/Nacio Herb Brown song in their shared shower that, while pleasant enough, probably shouldn't have netted him any sort of job opportunity. (He also couldn't have been much of an embezzler, given that Tommy and Sadie have about seventeen bucks between them.) Sadie is devastated, and still broke, so she winds up a chorine at a nightclub, where she makes the acquaintance of middle-aged millionaire and drunkard Jack Brennan (Edward Arnold), who instantly falls in love with her, and she decides his proposal is as better chance for survival than some, though what really pushes her into Jack's arms is his young lawyer friend—Michael Alderson—who whipsaws between paternalistic concern for his childhood sweetheart and calling her, barely between the lines, a gold-digging whore. So she marries the man, Michael remains firmly set against it, and Sadie alternates being pining for Tommy and realizing that Jack's well on the way to drinking himself right into an early grave, and that she'd be what Michael accused her of being if she actually let that happen.
That's a lot of incident, but maybe it's fair to say that Sadie McKee doesn't have much of a hook, or at least one that plays—it's a "romance," if you insist, wherein Crawford is offered fully three men to choose from, and they're all so dismal (I'm not sure if it's a flaw or just humanistic insight that neither Tommy, the character, nor Raymond's performance thereof, so much as remotely justifies Sadie's continued affections) that the one who's somehow the most appealing is the old fat alcoholic who winds up punching her in the face because she's standing between him and booze. But it does have a lot going for it, above all Crawford herself, providing a star turn that winds up entirely coterminously with a character study of a young woman thrown into the jaws of the Great Depression that itself is a lightly-moralizing problem play sort of thing concerning the concept of a young woman thrown into the jaws of the Great Depression, though what it's moralizing about is how its audience ought to withhold their condemnations, as they, like Michael, are likely to have misjudged her. Now, I don't believe it's accorded a huge measure of greatness by her fans (contemporary critics were, at best, merely respectful), but it's iconic enough Crawford that Sadie McKee is the clip What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? deploys as a synecdoche for its older crypto-Crawford's vanished stardom, and, like I said earlier, Sadie is the character I think of when I think of Crawford's screen persona: the girl-next-door prone to making mistakes, and capable of startling acts of cold pragmatism and baleful anger, but still, in her heart, decent and warm—and in Sadie McKee's best-performed scene, we get all three at once, as Crawford has to juggle Tone's condescension and Arnold's repulsive drunkenness, allowing Tone to basically talk her into submitting to the latter's overtures out of spite for the former, while also permitting flashes of affinity for the sloppy parvenu to briefly surprise her, overtaking her desired pose of vindictiveness towards her persecutor, when Jack reveals that he too is the child of a humble cook, just like she is.
It's a movie where its characters can be mean as all hell, but the movie itself is nice, and wants to give them the best chance of explaining themselves for even their shittiest or most scandalous actions, and a chance to redeem themselves. Crawford is, needless to say, an excellent vessel for such an exploration of how class and sex and all that stuff intersect in the early 1930s; and this is the part where I have to make a grandiose claim. I am, generally, of the opinion that art doesn't matter very much—that is, it's very important that we have beautiful or meaningful things to fill our time with, but that the strong claims of art having genuine cultural importance are self-refuting bullshit, movies not obviously having any more impact than any other medium; because if movies did have that kind of cultural importance, we'd be living in a socialist utopia by now—but in the sheer amount of them, the women's melodramas of the 30s and 40s had to have had some influence.
It's curious: you could look at any individual entry and recognize that they almost uniformly embody some really old-fashioned patriarchal morality and in every case the woman suffers for her transgressions (or "transgressions"), but, by the same token, if they are to be successful, they always have to make you cry about it; in the aggregate, if you have a thousand movies about sluts getting punished, but it's tragic, eventually you have to start to question if punishing sluts is good, and the ideas in your head have to shift around a little, both for the intended audience of women who came to cry, and for the men who came to see Crawford, or Garbo, or whoever, be sixty feet tall and hot (or, not to be reductive even about men in the 1930s, who came to cry themselves, because it is, after all, what the things are for). And in this Sadie McKee is typical yet still pretty special, just by being so darned humane in how it examines, step-by-step, how and why a woman such as Sadie, eventually revealed as the best anyone could hope she could be, makes suboptimal decisions because they've been constrained so hard by the very limited possibilities provided by her gender and the economic apocalypse that had shaken the whole world. (Cf. the glib examination of, say, Gold Diggers of 1933, or the reputedly much flintier-edged examination of Viña Delmar's original short story. But like each of those, this is an extremely Depression-era movie, as is underlined with some blunt shorthand: Sadie, bordering on starvation, is about to scavenge a key lime pie from a fellow diner at an automat until the man puts his cigarette out in it, a gross little metaphor for the whole economy.) The unsettled attitude, anyway, is embodied in the difference between the marketing for Sadie McKee and the actual movie, Sadie McKee: the primitive tagline for the movie goes (in several variations) "I gave ten cents worth of love for a $17,000,000 husband!", possibly a sub rosa admission about that hooklessness I mentioned earlier, and playing off of Crawford's more-or-less openly-a-prostitute roles in movies like Possessed and Rain, and I suppose you could call this as much a golddigger fantasy as Possessed was ("say, what if Clark Gable paid me to fuck him?"), albeit in a rather different register. But that tagline ain't at all accurate, since I'm pretty sure it cost more than a dime even in 1934 for your own live-in substance abuse counselor.
It's also fairly unusual in how it treats drunkenness: Jack starts off a goofy buffoon, but Brown doesn't let him remain sloshy comic relief—which is good for other reasons, namely that "30s drunkard comedy" can be some of the most tedious shit in the world—but Brown recalibrates your impressions basically inside of a single shot as he hangs on Jack's helplessness while he has his butler (Leo G. Carroll) take his pants off for him, and it becomes more pitiable than amusing. (Carroll, however, is an occasional source of comic relief; the big vector for that, though, is Opal (Jean Dixon), another one of Sadie's neighbors at the apartment she lost her boyfriend in, an older, tougher dame whose jaundiced view Sadie is obliged to adopt, just not so dogmatically.) But I do like the treatment of Sadie's money-marriage, and the strained affection that's still possible within it (though they're skittish about doing anything to imply that Jack so much as even tries to have sex with her), despite it being wholly wrong for Sadie, so that Jack, eventually, even has to realize that the whole prostitute-to-mommy-to-daughter arc of their marriage means it can't be right for him, either.
So what I mean by it being Brown at his most characteristic that it's his most characteristic as a storyteller—just how it treats these characters, and especially Sadie, as objects of sympathy and comprehension; it has a pretty ambivalent "happy" ending, to boot—though it is not, altogether, Brown at his most characteristic as a filmmaker, even if it's maybe increased a little in my esteem as a motion picture since the last time I saw it. It's not Possessed, which is the high-octane version of this, just "wow" moment after "wow" moment, and maybe that's even correct, even if we're not wrong to miss Oliver Marsh, continuing his collaborations with Brown and Crawford alike, lavishing shadows and light on his subjects in semi-expressionistic fashion all over the place; it's still solid, and sometimes very smartly-done, like the long take that follows Sadie back and forth through the Aldersons' kitchen and dining room and lets Crawford build up a good head full of steam at her careless employers (while simultaneously unifying and sharply delineating their two separate worlds), or the subtler but even better confrontational editing scheme Brown and Hugh Wynn get up to at a dinner in Jack's mansion, where Michael and Sadie have been left alone to fling barely-restrained accusations and insults against each other across a half-dozen jarring axial cuts. (There's also something going on with Tommy, inasmuch as Brown, in deploying his most lushly romantic film language on behalf of his scenes with Sadie, is perhaps even allowing that to emphasize the hollowness of his personality, his final scene being sad, but also designed to visually convey the cold desolation that her love for him always represented—while the last scene, a little ambiguous but not that ambiguous, is allowed to be so cozy and intimate and human.) There's also a fair amount of location shooting—and, when it's not location shooting, it's at least clear that Cedric Gibbons and company were given a directive to make their sets large and filmic, but also physically and commercially plausible—that gets across the enormous gulf between the haves and the have-nots in this world, a gulf that Sadie, by whatever means are available to her and I-think-you-know-what-I-mean, is attempting to bridge without, at the same time, compromising her soul.
It's not pyrotechnics, and this is true in its melodrama as well, to the point that "melodrama" might even be more a term of convenience for it (on the other hand, a drunk falls forty feet down a flight of stairs, and some tuberculosis happens, so maybe "melodrama" is fine); but it works. I don't know if I'd go so far as to call it a hidden gem in Brown's or Crawford's filmographies—it's not, after all, so obscure as to justify that title. But maybe it is a little underappreciated, even so.
Score: 7/10
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