The Bad One (1930) Poster

(1930)

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5/10
Certainly Not A Good One
boblipton2 April 2023
Edmund Lowe jumps ship in Marseilles and gets tangled up with tavern dancer Dolores Del Rio, who's tangled up with Don Alvarado. Lowe left Brooklyn because of a dame, so he's not anxious to fall for someone like Del Rio, but he does, and she for him it looks like. But when they're about to get married, Alvarado starts a fight and winds up dead, and Lowe goes to prison. Is Del Rio going back to her old ways?

There's a lot of talent behind this Joseph Schenck production for United Artists, with George Fitzmaurice directing, John Farrow and Carey Wilson having hands in the script, William Cameron Menzies designing the impressive sets, and Karl Struss in charge of the camera. Visually it's a treat, with Miss Del Rio dancing up a storm, but they could have used a better dialogue director than Earle Brown, because everyone starts out vocally overwrought and stays that way throughout. As a result, it's hard to take any of them seriously, especially with Lowe's on-again, off-again lower-class accent. The result is one of those films that showed that Hollywood was still trying to learn how to talk, and not succeeding.
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6/10
Aptly titled transitional talker
arthursward5 July 2002
Someone please decaffienate poor Delores Del Rio and open Mr. Lowe's eyes. Alas, no one uttered these directions to our leads. And so is spoiled a film of promise. How much cringing can one endure to enjoy some awesome sets from William Cameron Menzies? Edmund Lowe "sings", but I wouldn't call it music (embarrassing, perhaps). Miss Del Rio, clearly lost for how to act in a talking picture, emotes about 150 miles per hour. Scene after scene for the first 30 minutes is rasberry-worthy. This is such a shame, because work from the seconds and art direction invite scrutiny. A marvelous French village and prison are sumptuously photographed, and Mr. Lowe occasionally recovers the steely, resolved look that kept him popular through the '30's. Certainly, a textbook case of the birth of a new art form, and the difficulties the transition wrought.
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