CHAINED
1934
Directed by Clarence Brown
Written by Edgar Selwyn and John Lee Mahin
There's not much mystery behind the production of Clarence Brown's second and final movie of 1934, Chained: earlier that year, Sadie McKee had been a pretty big hit, and Brown and Joan Crawford clearly worked well together (certainly with more actual affection than existed between Brown and Greta Garbo, let alone Brown and Norma Shearer), and so they were packaged off to make another Crawford vehicle of the same basic type, this time bringing back Clark Gable, a significant fixture in each of their personal lives, who obviously worked well with both of them. And by all accounts they had a perfectly relaxed good time making it, albeit at the cost of having no particularly obvious interest in the movie itself. Chained, you see, doesn't quite rise to the level of "good," even though there's nothing blatantly wrong with it—there's no irredeemable breakdown of the screenplay or miscalibration of the stars to their roles, nothing like that. In fact, it bears an interesting premise that feels like it ought to make it reasonably unique amongst MGM's "basically all women are golddiggers, or literal prostitutes, but we mean that sympathetically" genre, a sort of streamlined but potentially more complicatedly-emotional version of Sadie McKee's unromantic money marriage, this time confronted with a more powerful alternative than Franchot Tone (as Crawford, in real life, would probably have agreed). Yet it's weirdly inert, almost unaccountably so, considering how much chemistry has been brought to bear upon it; so I guess there is a mystery, and we'll try to account for it anyway.
Having hollowed out and rebuilt Edgar Selwyn's play The Mirage as Possessed back in 1931, in the process doing the most of any single movie to establish Crawford's definitive screen persona (not to mention also consolidating the Brown/Crawford, Crawford/Gable, and Brown/Gable friendships and filmmaking partnerships), Chained found Brown once again tapping Selwyn (Selwyn was, by now, an MGM director himself, as well as a screenwriter), and, as before, subsequently largely overwriting him, including changing his title. (Whatever the hell Selwyn was thinking with the name Sacred and Profane Love is lost to history—neither the 1921 film of the same name nor the 1514 Titian painting seem to have the slightest resonance with it—but goodness, what a pompous and unprosodic thing to call your movie either way, moreso considering that for neither male side of this love triangle is the love all that sacred or all that profane.) However, instead of Brown working closely with Leonore Coffee to craft a flawlessly-tight screenplay out of Selwyn's material, that would also be a framework for some of Brown's most feverish directorial ideas, the principal author of Chained is John Lee Mahin, either atop of or in parallel to some drafts from Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich that to all reports were entirely disregarded. Even Mahin's screenplay had all its bolts loosened by a studio that had become smugly comfortable with Crawford-and-Gable rumor press, so that it feels like a good forty minutes of the movie is just watching them hang out in scenes that feel virtually written on the day, if not altogether improvised between the two and their director.
That's not necessarily one of its fatal flaws, but we'll get to it. Where we begin is in New York City, where secretary Diane Lovering (Crawford) is blasting a speedboat around the docks, enjoying the last hours of the ritzy vacation her relationship with her boss, shipping magnate Richard Field (Otto Kruger), has afforded her, before she returns to Richard's office. By coincidence, she arrives only shortly before his wife (Marjorie Gateson) does, and as none of this is a secret to any of the interested parties anymore, the three hash out their future: Mrs. Field adamantly refuses to grant the divorce Richard has asked for, and, having made her point, simply leaves; Diane avers that she's content to stay by Richard's side and be his unofficial partner, if he so desires it; but, moved by her loyalty, Richard doesn't want her to make such a socially dangerous decision out of obligation, so he sends her off on another damn vacation—nice work if you can get it, right?—to think it over, a cruise down to Buenos Aires and back. (He sends her with a maid, the Una O'Connor, who is such a non-factor that she shocks you when she shows up again to fail to even do any Una O'Connor shtick, and while that's arguably no kind of flaw, fatal or otherwise—frankly, it feels relieving, like dodging a bullet—it is still very bizarre that anyone bothered including and casting this character at all, let alone with such a noticeable actor; so it could be somewhat indicative of what's going on with the film, production-wise.)
On the boat, she's hit up by John Smith ("no, really!"; Stuart Erwin), an annoying creep who happens to be friends with Michael Bradley (Gable), who exploits the situation to "rescue" Diane, and even though she figures out his scam immediately, he's there and Gable-shaped and he annoys her till they have a friendship that continues at his ranch in the Argentine. It seems altogether likely that Diane has found a new love to replace the impossible relationship she has back home; but returning to New York to tell Richard it's over, he blasts her with the "good" news, he's gotten a divorce after all, somewhat wrecking his whole life over her. So when he asks for her hand in marriage, how could she say no—even if she'll never be happy and the man she loves is on the other side of world?
Hence the title they went with, I guess, though "Chained" sure comes off a little harder-core than anything the movie's about. The interesting thing I was talking about is that it's a story that truly has no villains, with every relevant atom of the screenplay and every aspect of Kruger's performance dedicated to the notion that Richard Field is an honorable suitor possessed of abundant kindness and wisdom; so, perversely, the interesting thing about the movie might also actually be that fatal flaw we were looking for, and it doesn't realize or, for commercial reasons inhering to the fact that what audiences wanted was Crawford and Gable onscreen together, at least can't allow itself to realize that it's Crawford and Kruger who necessarily have the most fascinating dynamic. It refuses to realize this to the extent that they almost don't have scenes together—Kruger's participation basically amounts only to a pair of bookends, and Richard is at best a structuring absence—and their preexisting relationship, in effect a whole missing first act, is featurelessly-conceived to the extent that I'm pretty sure it's a deliberate move, so that it can't ever be anything more than the plot pivot upon which Sadie McKee's I mean Diane Lovering's selfless and correct and ultimately-rewarded decisions turn. But the thing is, unlike Sadie McKee, this never reads as "money marriage," some economic security arrangement she was backed into by a desolating and hostile world. Sure, it's true that Kruger has a couple of decades on Crawford (and, to complete the "Richard is too interesting for this movie" thing, Kruger might have the most damn interiority of the cast despite being a virtual bit-player, flawlessly communicating to the audience during a climactic breakfast where he has cause to consider when he and Mike graduated from their respective Ivy League colleges that he hadn't really considered that age gap before, but it's just hit him like a bomb); but Kruger has also aged rather gracefully, this being on top of how startlingly swell and comprehending he is. You'd fuck him, is the point, if less than Gable, or at least Diane must have originally thought so. Diane wasn't even eager to get away and have independence; he sends her away. On the cruise, she makes sure to have their drink (a sherry flip*) every night at the same time he does. The "chains" are chains Diane had to have fashioned for herself; we can't afford it the content of one, because that would've gotten too messy, but this had to have been a real romance, down to how it's somewhat implied to be a chaste courtship that simply happened to coincide with one of their marriages.
That gets to how the deck was stacked against Chained from the start: it came out in August 1934, meaning what we've got is Brown's first real post-Code film, and a whole lot of what's happening in Chained makes more sense if we understand it to have been made in a fog of confusion about where the actual boundaries of content were going to land once enforcement kicked in, so that despite being built out of pre-Code tropes in every way it scurries off in terror at any possibility that it might even be suggesting sex; in turn, what that means is that the whole "Gable and Crawford hang out for forty Goddamn minutes" phase is determinedly heatless, with nothing sexy enough to cut against the extremely bad taste that its opening gestures will have likely left in your mouth, perhaps less to a 1934 audience than a 2025 one, but I think it somewhat objectively sucks. There's a form of energy in these sequences, at least—though it's an awfully floppy, palsy-walsy one, rather than the effortless eroticism Brown usually brought to his melodramas. (Adding to the flatter emotions is a flatter aesthetic: this was the first film George J. Folsey shot for Crawford, inaugurating a long-term collaboration for the simple reason that Crawford thought Folsey made her look pretty. Leaving aside how utterly incompetent you'd have to be to not make Crawford look pretty—like how, leaving the lens cap on?—what this means is that we're missing out on Brown's guy, Oliver T. Marsh, who made Crawford look pretty and made her look dramatic, with the far-ranging talent to execute Brown's visual ideas about light and shadow. In fact, Sadie McKee turns out to have been Brown's last collaboration with two of his important craftspeople, Marsh as well as editor Hugh Wynn, the former for no reason I can identify, the latter because he was very old and was shortly to pass. Anyway, Folsey is not a bad cinematographer—he later shot Come Live With Me for Brown, and at turns he found a better approach to Crawford even in The Last of Mrs. Cheyney and Brown's The Gorgeous Hussy, which are unfortunately bad movies, though it was right back to wholly anonymous photography with her in The Shining Hour—also, unfortunately, a bad movie. Outside of Folsey, who still shoots it fine, we do have an admirable physical production from Cedric Gibbons's art department—the ship sets are nice and airy—and some Adrian Greenburg creations for Crawford, the dopiest being her speedboat outfit with a giant anchor on it like a maritime-themed superhero, the best being a frilly-collared thing that's "wearable" so long as you don't intend on moving your head on its axis.)
But, anyway, the Brown of it is still probably better than the Mahin of it. Hell, the best-directed stuff in the whole movie is the beginning of the "hey, let's hang" phase, with Johnny's pestering and Mike's shitty ruse, with a lot of fun staging around the ship's bar—culminating in the best shot, Mike and Johnny joking about how they got one over on her whilst Diane stands behind and between them and Crawford amusingly reacts in pique to this new information—and the second best-directed, or at least most unexpectedly-directed stuff comes towards the end of this phase, where the three have eaten a giant meal and we get all these acutely-angled shots from below their crotches of Gable, Erwin, and Crawford taking their belts off with relief. And I don't know, it's got an energy, like I said, but maybe it's not the most romantic thing in the world to imagine how bloated with gas Joan Crawford's intestines are.
Some of this sounds kind of cute, I realize, and some of it is, maybe especially that last thing despite my gross description of it (one could frame it, "aw, the couple ate themselves sick"), but besides being a bit creepish to start, and (this is the real sin my book) doubling-down on how charming it thought it was being, the dialogue bounds around occupying all points between clever and yammering, particularly Mike annoying Diane at the ship's pool, deciding that her name is Dinah** like his childhood blackface doll (this is the part that feels "possibly full-on improv," including a moment where Crawford may have actually aspirated water). They're bubbly in ways that seem more fun for Crawford and Gable than for us or even for Diane and Mike, and after that we just get Brown pilfering his own back catalog, though I kind of wish he'd chosen a movie to steal from that also hadn't starred Crawford when he just repeats the ship-bound middle act of Letty Lynton. Perhaps especially because Robert Montgomery's glib dork in that film is, in Clark Gable's hands, obviously going to only be a glib dickhead, with post-Code jitters meaning none of Gable's sex god attributes get deployed to leaven the glib dickheadedness, and also because when this cutesy frolicking happened in Letty Lynton, it was in stark contrast to Crawford's character having just escaped a horrible addiction to a man whose love was utter cruelty, rather than an Otto Kruger whose only character traits are being generous and saintly.
For all that, I think it ends better than it probably deserves: this is a total B-side in Brown's career, and even for a director for whom the majority of his late 20s and 30s filmography can be reductively argued to be the same movie over and over again anyway, Chained is nothing but an echo of his women's picture masterpieces; but even so, that set-up I called interesting is still interesting, and there's finally some feeling and sensitivity in the place it most needs to go, including the best parts of Gable's performance and the most complex convolution that ever accrues to Diane's character, in her attempt to get Mike to hate her, because that would make it easier for him to heal. Honestly, knowing what I was getting, I even liked the whole film a skosh more than I did the first time I saw it. But for all that it might be interesting, it's hard not to get the impression that if it is an interesting idea, it's not necessarily one all that conducive to making a movie out of it, given that Brown and everyone else involved only barely made one out of it here.
Score: 5/10
*Which Mike declares effeminate and weak, unlike his serious, manly cocktail, the daquiri.
**I would also swear in court that, in addition to Mike's pet name of "Dinah," she is called both DIE-an and DEE-an at different points in this movie, which is pretty suggestive all by itself what a low-effort, low-quality control affair we've got here. For that matter, things might have been very different in 1934, and it's in black-and-white and all, but I wouldn't recognize those dark-complexioned, seemingly uniced drinks as "daquiris" in a million years.
No comments:
Post a Comment