Continuing the tradition of brisk pre-Code films, Joel McCrea’s occasional appearances in Gregory La Cava’s 1933 Bed of Roses serve as strange moral medium between the wanton hedonism of the lead Constance Bennett and the upcoming censorship of the era. Screenwriter Wanda Tuchock’s story of jail-hopping prostitutes-on-the-side seems like a victory lap for vice-ridden cinematic world of the early 30s, including flippant talk of suicide, heavily implied sex, liberal boozing, and poking fun at previous attempts of government sponsored moral judgment (“The Eighteenth Amendment is a law, and as a law should be enforced until it stops being a law”). The film begins in a prison as Bennett’s Lorry Evans and partner-in-crime Minnie (Pert Kelton) walk out of their cells, trash-talking life outside in radio-ready cadence and street-ready slang. They have short hair, hats tipped on the side of their head (I assume gravity worked differently in...
- 6/5/2015
- by Zach Lewis
- MUBI
Joel McCrea, Charles Coburn, and Jean Arthur in The More the MerrierWriting about acting is hard. Or rather, avoiding bad writing about acting is hard. When starting this article I nearly fell into that dichotomous peril of guessing which little actions were choices made by the actor himself or the director in charge. That’s a dumb, unfruitful game that would warrant nothing more than self-congratulation if some historical figure were to admit how correct I was. Yet, that dumb, unfruitful notion was the first frame of this article, likely spawned from the innumerable like-minded articles about acting. I’m being this transparent because I’ve taken the call-to-arms from Kent Jones in the most recent issue of Film Comment. In his article, Jones lists the pratfalls critics take when talking about acting, more often than not relying on conventional wisdom about the mythos surrounding certain actors and conventional wisdom...
- 4/13/2015
- by Zach Lewis
- MUBI
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