Mary Brian (1906-2002)

"The Sweetest Girl in Pictures," Mary Brian is today best known for two public domain titles, The Front Page (1931) and the British release The Amazing Adventure (1935).

Photo: Mary Brian and the author in Studio City 1994.

Sari Maritza (1910-1987)

Heavily publicized by Paramount Pictures in 1932 as that studio's “new” Marlene Dietrich – the original Marlene proving recalcitrant by demanding to work solely with her personal Svengali, Josef von Sternberg – Sari Maritza was in reality nice Dora Patricia Detering Nathan, born in China to a British military officer and his Viennese wife. Stagestruck Patricia did indeed study voice in Vienna, which is where she met British talent coach Vivian Gaye, who became her manager and persuaded her to change her name to the much more exotic Sari Maritza, a moniker hinting of gay operetta and all things Viennese. Unfortunately, Vivian's timing was a bit off. Sound films were rapidly taking over in Europe as well by 1929 and the newly coined Sari Maritza quickly “learned” to speak English “like a native.” “They thought I was a very clever girl,” Patricia Nathan later recalled. They did indeed, as did Charles Chaplin, in Berlin at the same time Sari was making her third motion picture appearance, Ufa's Bomben auf Monte Carlo (released 1932). She was on Chaplin's arm at the London premiere of City Lights (1931) and everybody assumed she would be his leading lady both on and off the screen. That didn't happen and instead she signed with Paramount. By then the cat was out of the bag, so to speak, and Paramount's attempts to turn her into a Continental femme fatale were ludicrous on the face of it and deservedly met with scorn. As a consequence, the homegrown Tallulah Bankhead got all the Dietrich rejects and Maritza instead lampooned herself opposite W.C. Fields in the anarchic International House (1933). Both Sari and costar Erich Von Stroheim admittedly did the dreary WWI drama Crimson Romance (1934), from poverty row upstart Mascot Pictures, solely for the dough, after which Sari Maritza left the screen for good to marry MGM producer Sam Katz. She divorced Katz ten years later and by 1947 was found living in Washington, DC with her second husband, George Clother, “an economics student [!] at Georgetown.” Sari Maritza died in the U.S. Virgin Islands.  Sari Maritza's name, and that of Vivian Gaye, resurfaced two years after the former's death, when rumors of a homosexual relationship between early 1930s housemates Cary Grant and Randolph Scott once again did the rounds. According to the gossip mills, they were a gay foursome, the girls, Lesbians of course, bearding for the boys. Reached for a comment, Vivian Gaye dismissed the rumors as completely misinterpreting what was just carefree California living. So there!

Greek Street (US title Latin Lovers; UK, 1930) PD **

Sari Maritza makes her screen debut in this Gaumont-British production as Anna, an orphan singing in an Italian establishment in London. She falls for the owner, Rikki (William Freshman), but he takes great umbrage when she decides to accept an offer from Mansfield Yates (Martin Lewis) to become a star in his upscale establishment. Unfortunately, Yates expects more from Anna than she is ready to give and after having performed two production numbers to great acclaim, she leaves Yates and his high falutin' night spot in favor of returning to her humble beginnings and Rikki.

The only surprising aspect of this early talkie musical is not Sari Maritza's “amazing” way with the English language, which had already been thoroughly debunked, but how fluid  the film moves. Early European talkies are supposed to be even more moribund than their Hollywood counterparts but that is certainly not in evidence here. In fact, the opening sequence, a long dolly shot through a crowded Italian restaurant, the camera occasionally picking out an interesting face or two among the spectators, is as good as anything American cinematographers were doing at the time. There is a second, similar, sequence that demonstrates Percy Strong's ability with a camera, this time following fuddy-duddy Sir George Ascot (Bert Coote, the father of Robert Coote who played the exact same type of characters in Hollywood movies of the 1940s) as he is pushed about by the throng in the very same establishment. Unfortunately, except for the obligatory kaleidoscopic view of chorus girls in action (and, no, Busby Berkeley did not invent the overhead shot of dancers cavorting), the production numbers are static and uninteresting. Especially if Sari Maritza's coloratura gets on your nerves as it did mine. The performances run the gamut from over-the-top (Australian actor William Freshman ladles on an Italian accent with a trowel) to underwhelming (Miss Maritza), but, if nothing else, Greek Street is worthwhile from a historical standpoint.

Fifi D'Orsay (1904-1983)

The former Yvonne Lussier, of Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Fifi D'Orsay had been trained as a typist but came to New York in the wake of Anna Held and Irene Bordoni, the original “Ooh la la” type musical comedy performers. She never reached Held and Bordoni's fame on the Great White Way – in fact, she didn't reach Broadway until the age of 66 when she became one of the old gals in “Follies” – but joined the chorus line in the “Greenwich Village Follies.” Broadway humorist turned movie star Will Rogers brought her to Hollywood and she joined him as his foil in both They Had to See Paris (1929) and Young As You Feel (1931). The Girl from Calgary was a rare starring role and, as we shall see, depended entirely too much on her slight talents – but she was really better in support. She filmed less frequently after 1935 but “Follies,” of course, gave her a nostalgic sheen and she did television until the early 1970s, after which she retired to New Hope, PA. Known as the “French Bombshell,” D'Orsay actually never left North America and when she won a trip to Paris appearing on Ralph Edwards' This Is Your Life, she exchanged the ticket for cash.

The Girl from Calgary (Monogram, 1932) PD **
A couple of New York impresarios, Larry and Monte (Paul Kelly and Eddie Featherstone), persuade Calgary chantoos Fifi Follette (Fifi D'Orsay) and her roommate Maizie (Astrid Allwyn) to accompany them to New York, where Larry assures them jobs on Broadway. Fifi quickly wins a beauty contest in Atlantic City and soon her charm and talent have won over not only Broadway producer Earl Darrell (Edwin Maxwell) but his rich backer, Bill Webster (Robert Warwick). That's pretty much all there is to this story, except that Webster attempts to win Fifi away from Larry, who has fallen in love with her. Larry pretends that he is fine with Fifi selling herself to Webster, but of course isn't and tries to win her back.

How about this for make-believe: Fifi D'Orsay, who is perhaps cute but certainly no raving beauty, wins a major contest in Atlantic City (take a wild guess as to which one!) As a singer, she is adequate at best, but wins the starring role in a big Broadway musical (and haven't we seen that wildly applauding first night crowd a million times before?), performing no less than three solo numbers wearing a bunch of feathers on her head and a short skirt that combined do nothing for her figure. No wonder that the much prettier Astrid Allwyn, who suffers a severe case of lower billing, goes green with envy. (Allwyn made a career of playing jealous girls, notably in Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington [1939]). Perhaps I am being too hard on Fifi D'Orsay – and considering her later success I may actually be – but she really is the whole show here and that is just too tall an order.

Walking in and out of the various theatrical front offices visited by Fifi and her impresario in The Girl from Calgary are several interesting starlets, including Geraldine Dvorak (1904-1985) who, aside from playing one of Bela Lugosi's vampire brides in Dracula (1931), was Greta Garbo's stand-in at MGM; and Kathryn Sergava (1910-2005),a former ballerina from Russian Georgia who, very briefly, was Warner Bros.' answer to Garbo herself. It was poor Miss Sergava who in 2003 was pronounced prematurely dead by a New York columnist causing a truly memorable headline: “Dead Wrong!” And then there is Geneva Mitchell (1908-1949; photo left), a stunning beauty who had come to Hollywood in 1929 with quite a pedigree as a “Ziegfeld Follies” show girl (the 1920 “Midnight Frolic” and the 1921 “Follies”). Yet here she is in a silent bit but showing her shapely legs and making yet another unfair comparison to the rather dumpy Miss D'Orsay. Mitchell later earned a contract with Columbia, a minor step up, I suppose, but her films remained solidly in the B category. Today, she is remembered only for the three shorts she made with the Stooges: Pop Goes the Easel, Hoi Polloi, and Restless Knights (all 1935). Sadly, she died too young from an undisclosed illness.

Greta Granstedt (1907-1987)

Always claiming to have been born in Malmö, Sweden, Greta Granstedt actually hailed from Scandia, KS, the daughter of Swedish immigrants. She was raised in the town of Mountain View, CA, however, which is where she wed the first of a total of 7 (seven!) husbands, and where she was accused of shooting down and critically wounding a would-be boyfriend who had taken another girl to a church social. According to later press reports, Greta, 14 at the time, was found not guilty of premeditated shooting but a San Jose judge decreed that “she must leave Mountain View, the town of her birth [sic], and never come back" This story reached the papers around the time Miss Granstedt had entered films and was about to take her third husband, one Ramon Ramos. The notice also reminded the reader that Greta's mother, Mrs. Stauffer Granstedt, had been among the 78 persons drowned in the 1929 sinking of the San Juan off the Southern California coast, the Granstedts having been en route to visit their daughter in Hollywood. No wonder she was called Hollywood's “Tragedy Girl.”

In contrast to her tumultuous personal life, Greta Granstedt's screen career was really rather anticlimactic. She can be seen today in the 1932 Mascot serial The Devil Horse, which is in public domain (see my other blog, “Meanwhile … Back at the Ranch"), and is perhaps even better known as the second female lead in the early anti-Nazi thriller Beast of Berlin (1939). Back in the early 1930s, though, she appeared in quite a few contemporary crime films and is actually quite good in the well-remembered Street Scene (1930). In between film assignments and marrying the dizzying amount of times, she appeared on stage in a variety of roles, both on Broadway and with touring companies. Her final screen appearance came in the odd genre film The Return of Dracula (1958), in which she played a California hausfrau haunted by the title vampire (Francis Lederer). According to gossip maven Hedda Hopper, Greta survived a bout with throat cancer in the 1960s and later relocated to Canada, where she raised Appaloosa horses. She died in Los Angeles October 7, 1987. According to a press notice in April of 1959, Greta was one of the mourners at the Hollywood funeral of Dorothy Sebastian, her erstwhile leading lady in They Never Come Back.

They Never Come Back (Artclass, 1932) PD ***
After learning that his mother had just passed away, boxer Jimmy Nolan (Regis Toomey) not only loses his fight but permanently injures his arm. To support himself and his younger sister Mary (Greta Granstedt), Jimmy takes a job as a bouncer at Jerry Filmore's (Earle Foxe) Club Royale where he begins a romance with headliner Adele (Dorothy Sebastian). The latter's brother, Ralph (Edward Woods), the box office manager, pockets $500 and Filmore blames Jimmy who takes the rap. Ralph, who has fallen in love with Mary, confesses to his sister that he framed Jimmy on Filmore's orders and the two pairs of siblings, including Jimmy out on good behavior, set a trap for the villainous nightclub owner.

Produced at Ralph M. Like's Tec-Art Studios on Sunset Blvd. (today's KCET) by Artclass Pictures, a minor concern operated by the very minor Weiss Bros., Adolph, Max and Louis, They Never Come Back remains one of those typical early talkie melodramas where everybody talk really fast and say things like “glad to know you” and “I oughta ...” (Well, the latter cliché is actually not in the film, but you get the drift). Like so many of these long-forgotten little thrillers, this one seems to have caught 'em on the way up and down. “Up” included Regis Toomey, a sort of low budget Jimmy Cagney or Lee Tracy type, Greta Granstedt and Eddie Woods; and “down,” silent screen personalities Dorothy Sebastian (Mrs. William “Hopalong” Boyd at the time), Gertrude Astor and Earle Foxe. The latter was actually better known for his private academy for young boys, the Black-Foxe Military Institute, which was frequented by a host of show business children. They Never Come Back may not be great movie-making but is is an interesting glimpse of the depth of the Depression and includes a cameo by turn-of-the-century prize-fighting legend Jim J. Jeffries as the fight referee in the opening boxing match. Greta Granstedt as Jimmy's sister is actually a bit of a revelation for anyone who has only seen her in The Devil Horse. She is quite a fine little actress and seems very much a reflection of her time. No wonder she played so many working class girls in those early years of sound, when studios actually, at least some of the time, would attempt to reflect the real life struggles fought amongst ordinary Joes outside the gates of Hollywood studios. Artclass, meanwhile, which had begun production back in 1929, folded later in 1932 although the brothers Weiss continued to issue bottom of the barrel product well into the decade and beyond.

Josephine Dunn (1906-1983)

A New Yorker by birth, Josephine Dunn had been in the “Follies” before becoming one of Paramount's “Junior Stars” (Charles “Buddy” Rogers, Richard Arlen and Thelma Todd joined her in that honor). Her breakthrough screen role, however, was for Warner Bros., where she played Al Jolson's faithless wife and, worse yet, David Lee's faithless mother in The Singing Fool (1928), a so-called part-talkie (Josephine's part was silent, though). Leaving poor David Lee, the “Sonny Boy” of the film's best remembered song, to pursue a selfish career in show business would haunt her screen career forever, and although she was voted a 1929 Wampas Baby Star by Hollywood publicists, by the time she appeared in Murder at Dawn (1932), the little production that is the focus of this essay, there was precious little screen career left. Dunn was luckier in her personal life; or, rather, fourth time at the altar would prove the charm. In 1935, she married Carroll Case, the son of Frank Case, the owner of New York's famous theatrical haunt the Algonquin Hotel, a by all accounts happy union. Dunn was widowed by Case in 1978 and died at the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital on February 3, 1983.

Murder at Dawn (Big 4 Film Corp., 1932) PD*
Hidden away in a secluded mansion by unscrupulous backers, Professor Farrington (Frank Ball) puts the finishing touches on his VXO Dynamo, a gadget that will provide electricity by drawing power from the sun. (A highly political correct invention in the present but mainly a threat to stock market prices in 1932.) The good professor's daughter, Doris (Josephine Dunn), takes this very moment to announce her arrival along with her fiance Danny (Jack Mulhall) and friends Gertie and Freddy (Marjorie Beebe and Eddie Boland). Then panels begin to slide, bodies are being dumped and mysterious personages (Martha Mattox and Mischa Auer) keep lurking about. It is now up to Danny et al. to not only stay alive but prevent someone to steal the professor's invention.

I consider the late 1920s, early 1930s love affair with “haunted house” thrillers a forerunner of the slasher films of more recent days. Like the teenagers at Camp Crystal Lake and all the other camps, dormitories, suburban homes, or wherever horror movie kids about to get massacred tend to gather, the good folks ending up at secluded mansions by no fault of their own in classic Hollywood are blithely ignorant of what is in store for them. Of course, in retrospect they should have been considering the types that usually answer the door. Take Martha Mattox of Murder at Dawn, for example, one look at this sourpuss and you should run for your life. But no, our heroes and heroines instead forge ahead.

(Photo right: Josephine Dunn by Clarence Bull)

1932 saw two typical examples of the "Haunted House" genre, one, The Old Dark House, as wonderfully wicked today as it was eighty years ago, the other, well, Murder at Dawn. The latter, of course, doesn't have James Whale to direct with his tongue firmly in his cheek but journeyman Richard Thorpe, who appears to have taken everything at face value. It certainly doesn't come with a script based on a J.P. Priestley original and with additional dialogue (“Have a potato!”) by R.C. Sherriff. And instead of Melvyn Douglas, Charles Laughton and Gloria Stuart at the top of their game, we must suffer the thespian talents, or lack thereof, of Jack Mulhall, Eddie Boland (and, oh dear me, is he awful!) and, yes, Josephine Dunn. Actually, Josephine doesn't embarrass herself, she just doesn't have anything interesting to do or say. The result of all this, and the well-known Kenneth Strickfaden electrical gadgetry notwithstanding, is that Murder at Dawn plays like a stretched-out cliffhanger chapter that never seems to end.

Murder at Dawn was produced in Hollywood by New York-based Big 4 Film Corp., a purveyor of cheap westerns formed by Wisconsin entrepreneur John R. Freuler. Big 4's biggest scoop, if you can call it that, was winning the distribution deal for Overland Bound (1929), the first all-talking B-western. Freuler got the film after its creator, and star, Leo Maloney, had died from either too much stress or too much partying with possible distributors in New York. Big 4 lasted until mid-1932, when Freuler reorganized the company to become Freuler Film Associates/Monarch Pictures.

Dorothy Burgess (1905-1961)

Her mother was an actress, Grace Burgess, and her aunt the stage star Fay Bainter, so it was only natural that Los Angeles-born Dorothy Burgess would go on the stage. She did, in the popular “Music Box Revue,” and then understudied and later replaced Helen Hayes on Broadway in “Dancing Mothers.” Hollywood caught her while she was appearing in a Los Angeles production of “The Squall” and she made an indelible impression as Warner Baxter's faithless girl in O. Henry's In Old Arizona (1928). Baxter earned an Academy Award (years before someone named the award “Oscar”) and Burgess was forever saddled with playing rather tawdry sirens. She did that with some success, at least at first – she appeared in 14 films in 1933 alone – but an accident on the set of Universal's Ladies Must Love (1933), about the romantic lives of four gold diggers, left her with a sprained back and, in time, a nervous breakdown. In 1935, she left Hollywood to replace Edith Barrett on Broadway in “Piper Paid,” and when she returned five years later, mostly bit roles came her way. She turned to writing in her spare time – and by the mid 1940s she had quite a bit of spare time – even actually publishing a novel entitled “Say Uncle,” a thriller dealing with, appropriately, vampires. “I worked six hours a day for eight months,” she told the Hollywood Citizen News. “You work on what you write until you think it is perfect, and then you write some more.”

With her husband, a physician, Dorothy Burgess lived for many years in retirement in Palm Springs, CA. In March of 1961 she was brought to Riverside County Hospital with tuberculosis, succumbing to the disease on August 20, 1961.

The Stoker (Allied Pictures, 1932) PD ***

Cuckolded Dick Martin (Monte Blue), who has lost not only his wife but his once-thriving business as well, signs on as a stoker on a steamship bound for South America. There he meets the exotic Margarita (Dorothy Burgess), and although at first they don't get along, it is she who bails him out of jail once he gets in trouble with the law in Nicaragua. As it turns out Margarita is the daughter of a local planter and she soon agrees to marry Dick in the hopes that he may be able to enlist the US marines if the plantation is attacked by bandits. Dick is disgusted when he learns the truth of her machinations but changes his mind after learning that she loves him for himself and not only for who he is. And, sure enough, Dick is indeed able to summon help from the marines when the plantation find itself attacked.

Another early sound femme fatale, Natalie Moorhead (see an earlier post) plays Monte Blue's faithless wife in The Stoker, a true case of type casting. No one in 1932 needed much persuasion that Natalie, or Vera, the name of the cheating wife here, was up to no good. She never was. In contrast, Dorothy Burgess, similarly typecast in those days as a femme fatale, proves to be surprisingly heroic, and in fact ends up with the hero. But at first, of course, Monte Blue's Dick Martin assumes that Margarita is interested in him only for the protection he may provide. Then he learns that she actually loves him and, well, let's just say that a Happy Ending didn't often happen to Miss Burgess but it does here. All of this is trivial as film making goes, even early talkie film making, but director Chester Franklin keeps the plot moving at a clip from boardrooms to steamships to Nicaraguan jungles. Without ever leaving Hollywood.

(Photo: George Walsh and Dorothy Burgess)

Out of Singapore (Goldsmith Prods., 1932) PD ***

Things go very wrong indeed when Captain Carroll (William Moran) hires Woolf Barstow (Noah Beery) and his boatswain Scar Murray (Montagu Love), especially for the good captain himself who is suddenly dying from what Barstow describes as China fever. In reality, Barstow, who is known for sabotaging vessels for money, plans to take over the ship and wreck it for the insurance. But the scheme goes awry with the emergence on the ship of Concha (Dorothy Burgess), a dancer in a Singapore dive that Barstow once spurned and who is now out for revenge. At first resenting the late captain's daughter, Mary (Miriam Seegar), Concha soon enough helps the girl care for her dying father and with the aid of supposedly drunken second mate Steve Trent (George Walsh), Barstow and his crew get their comeuppance when the ship explodes. Also perishing is Concha, who sacrifices herself so that Steve and Mary may live to see another day together.

Also known as “Gangsters of the Sea,” a re-release title, Out of Singapore is really a rollicking good show if, as always, you can accept the low budget and some of the over-the-top performances. Then again, the florid performances is exactly what make movies like Out of Singapore so entertaining today. Noah Beery, for example, never met a piece of scenery he wouldn't chew, and does soe here with abandonment. The same goes for another silent screen blackguard, Montagu Love, as his second-in-command; and Dorothy Burgess, as the soiled hootch dancer adds her secial brand of tawdry glamour to the proceedings. Which have been directed with a sure sense of movement by silent screen serial star Charles Hutchison, who never let something as mundane as dialogue hold him back. Chalk up Out of Singapore as a minor winner. The film was released by poverty row's Ken Goldsmith Productions, by way of William Steiner in New York. Goldsmith issued a total of six potboilers between 1932 and 1934, including Carnival Lady (1933), featuring Wampas Baby Star Boots Mallory.

Carmel Myers (1899-1980)

Carmel Myers was, famously, the daughter of a rabbi and as such, perhaps the best known Jewish actress in town – or at least the best known openly Jewish actress in town. Because as hard as that may be to understand at this day and age, Hollywood, whether wholly “invented” by Jewish merchants or not, was really quite anti-Semitic. Thus is should come as no surprise that Miss Myers didn't play daughters of rabbis so much as exotic vamps, a sort of flapper version of Theda Bara. She did that most famously, and with a white wig too boot, as Iras in Ben-Hur (1925), but she is frankly overshadowed in that by the overall spectacle of the chariot race and the overall spectacle of Ramon Novarro's physique. Myers career waned precipitously in the early years of sound – hence her appearance in Action Pictures' Chinatown After Dark – but she recovered somewhat in supporting roles and, much later, as a chatty guest on television talk shows. She even once peddled her own perfume.

Chinatown After Dark (Action Pictures, 1931) PD **

After having delivered a valuable Chinese dagger to San Francisco merchant Lee Fong (Edmund Breese), Frank Bonner (Frank Mayo) mysteriously ups and disappears. Shortly thereafter the lights at the Fong house go out and a shot is fired. Lee Fong is found very much the worse for wear – dead, in fact – and Frank's brother, Jim (Rex Lease), becomes the not too obvious suspect. But Fong's white ward, Lotus (Barbara Kent), believes in Jim, with whom she is falling in love, and together they decide to solve the case and clear Jim's name. The clues lead the two straight to the Chinatown lair of one Madame Ying Su (top-billed Carmel Myers).

Truth be told, Chinatown After Dark's Carmel Myers appears the least likely Asian this side of Katharine Hepburn in Dragon Seed (1944). In fact, Miss Myers not only doesn't look Asian but she rolls her consonants in a highly non-Chinese manner. But there you have it: she is darkly exotic, her eyes are mostly downcast and her hands are folded at all times. Plenty Chinese for early Hollywood. The problem, of course, as it nearly always was in those days, is that there are genuine Asian-American performers in the cast and the difference is rather stark. But Chinatown After Dark doesn't really belong to Carmel Myers, whose billing is only a sign of who she used to be, but to action hero Rex Lease who flails his arms wildly in every donnybrook without hardly ever connecting with anyone. Par for the course in the days before the Republic Pictures stuntmen re-wrote the movie fight manual. Chinatown is also typical of its day in that there is hardly a single door or window without someone lurking outside, most of the time for no discernible reason. This type of stuff had been done better in the silent era, where you at least had some movement, and Chinatown After Dark is enlivened solely by that scene-stealing marvel Billy Gilbert, complete with trademark sneeze and Brooklynese sayings that leave the denizens of San Francisco's Chinatown stymied.

Gilbert, as Sgt. Dooley, inquiring about the young man seen with Lee Fong's body soon after the murder: “Will you give me a full description of the bird?

Lotus: “What bird?”

Dooley: “You know the bird that did the Houdini!”

Lotus: ???

Incidentally, the lovely Lotus, Fong's white ward (no chance of miscegenation here!), is played by Barbara Kent, who when she died at the age of 103 in 2011 became the longest living adult silent screen performer in history.

Chinatown After Dark was produced at what today is public television KCET on Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood by an enterprising little company named Action Pictures. Behind the moniker was Ralph M. Like, a sound engineer who had purchased the former Charles Ray Studio. Action Pictures later became Mayfair before closing shop in 1934. The lot was then purchased by Monogram Pictures and became famous for hosting everyone from Bela Lugosi to the Bowery Boys.

Rita La Roy (1901-1993)

Although seen more often in supporting roles in A movies than poverty row B fare, Rita La Roy was in many aspects a brunette version of Natalie Moorhead. Both were renowned clotheshorses both on and off the screen and both saw their careers decline in the late 1930s.

The following essay first appeared under my byline on the All-Movie Guide database website:

Dark and sultry-looking, Rita La Roy was burlesque queen Taxi Belle Hooper in Josef Von Sternberg's The Blonde Venus (1932) and thus on the receiving end of some of Marlene Dietrich's more stinging barbs. The role should have been a breakthrough but thanks to censorship (even pre-code censorship) most of La Roy's footage ended up on the cutting-room floor and she spent the remainder of her screen career playing catty and sometimes downright vituperative women in potboilers. The daughter, she claimed, of a French actress and a British nobleman, La Roy (born Ina Stuart, but in Idao and not Paris) had been a dress designer and stock company actress prior to making her screen debut in 1929. The Delightful Rogue (1929), opposite matinee idol Rod La Rocque, earned her a contract with RKO and she played a femme fatale in Check and Double Check (1930), an attempt to turn radio's Amos 'n' Andy into viable screen stars and perhaps her most visible film today. "In movies just for the money," as she often stated, La Roy apparently never turned down a role, no matter how miniscule, and her subsequent career was mostly spent playing minor vamps. She retired in 1943 but returned to the screen to play a fashion editor in You're My Everything (1949), a backstage musical from Fox, and perform a bit on early television.

Although always rumored to have been a lesbian, Rita La Roy was nevertheless married twice: 1931-1935 to Ben Hershfeld, her agent; and 1943-? to A.G. "Hank" Foley, "a well-known horse breeder." Since I included Rita in my book "Vixens, Floozies and Molls" in 1999 and submitted the above essay to AMC around 2002, I've learned that the former actress became a sort of 1950s version of Janice Dickinson, running her own modeling agency. By 1960 she had her own local Pasadena, CA television show, the Rita La Roy Show, where she and guests like Mr. Blackwell would discuss fashion and makeup tips. The show aired at 11 am on Saturdays, sandwiched between reruns of Mr. and Mrs. North and I Love Lucy.

In July of 1963 Rita La Roy, “stage, screen and television star and head of the world's largest modeling and charm school,” and Hollywood makeup man Mike Westmore were guest speakers at a seminar organized by the Studio Girl Cosmetics Co. of Glendale, CA.  And on June 7, 1969, the Van Nuys News announced that Rita La Roy, “former model agency owner, who is now writing a television series for Latin-American stations,” would be the guest speaker at the “sixth annual Woman of the Year presentation of the Burbank Junior Chamber of Commerce Women's Auxiliary” at the Five Horsemen Inn. She later ran a business engaging women to sell encyclopedias in their spare time.


Check and Double Check (RKO, 1930) PD *

Amos 'n' Andy come to the screen courtesy of Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, who recreate their radio characters in a stretched-out feature film version. The two language-mangling cab drivers unwittingly get involved with a case of a stolen deed that if recovered will provide poor Richard Williams (Charles Morton) with the means of marrying upper crusty Jean Blair (Sue Carol). Standing in the way of love conquering all are the Crawfords, Ralph (Ralf Harolde) and Eleanor (Rita La Roy), a tougher than nails pair of schemers. Amos and Andy, however, save the day and are soon back in the good graces of their (uncredited) girlfriends, Madame Queen and Ruby Taylor.

This is truly a matter of “we'll watch this so you don't have to.” To say that Check and Double Check makes for uncomfortable viewing is to state the obvious. Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll were white comedians and what could work on radio – and did, to an astonishing degree, for decades despite the inherent racism of Caucasians assuming “black” accents – was close to outright repulsive when acted out before the cameras. It is that way today and it was that way then, nothing much has changed. Yes, Check and Double Check made money for upstart sound film factory RKO but the embarrassment was enough to leave Amos 'n' Andy to the radio airwaves until actual African American performers could be persuaded to do a television version in the early 1950s. As for the white supporting cast, well, La Roy, Harolde, Carol, Morton and Irene Rich (who certainly should have known better having been a major star in the 1920s) perform their tasks with typical early talkie spirits. That is, slightly over-the-top and somewhat screechy.

The Honor of the Press (Mayfair Pictures Corp., 1932) PD ***Enterprising cub reporter Daniel Greeley (Edward J. Nugent) gets suspicious when a rival newspaperman, Larry Grayson (Reginald Simpson), phones in a news flash about one of the notorious Gold Baron's robberies even before said robbery has taken place. Is newspaper owner Roger Bradley (Bryant Washburn), whose daily Golden Nugget column remains a constant irritation for his city editor (Russell Simpson), actually the Gold Baron himself? And is he in cahoots with Grayson and the paper's gossip columnist, Daisy Tellem? Well, Daniel and his hat check girlfriend, June (Dorothy Gulliver) will soon find out – if they can survive a hail of machine gun bullets!

Gossip columnist Daisy Tellem (tell 'em, get it?) is played by Rita La Roy, of course, who earns top female billing in this Mayfair production despite her role being clearly subordinate to ingenue Dorothy Gulliver. Not to mention the fact that Daisy disappears entirely from the picture in the climactic 20 minutes or so. But before that, and in typical pre-code manner, Daisy has displayed her lovely gams to young Greeley after suggesting that he strike his match on the bottom of her shoe rather than the desk. Greeley gets his thrill and Daisy gets to reveal that she had earlier displayed her legs before both Florenz Ziegfeld and George White, rival Broadway connoisseurs of pulchritude. La Roy also has a typically snooty encounter with Miss Gulliver (“Glad to know you,” she says insincerely when introduced) and her presence is actually sorely missed when she suddenly disappears. Leading man Eddie Nugent is quite good in a breezy Depression era sort of way and the supporting players are all well-known professionals around Poverty Row. Which is where Mayfair Pictures Corporation was located, in the old Charles Ray Studio at 4376 Sunset Boulevard  in Hollywood, a complex that later became Monogram Pictures (The Bowery Boys and Bela Lugosi filmed there,) and is today public television KCET. Mayfair came out of sound technician Ralph M. Like's Action Pictures (Mrs. Like, the lovely and untalented Blanche Mehaffey, appeared in plenty of the films) and existed 1932-1934. The studio's perhaps best remembered film was the mystery The Monster Walks (Action Pictures, 1932).

Rita La Roy at her haughtiest confronted by Rosalind Keith (left) in Columbia's Find the Witness (1937 not PD)

Natalie Moorhead (1901-1992)

“Natalie Moorhead,” wrote columnist Wick Evans, “gives out the impression of coldness.” And that pretty much explains Miss Moorhead's brief vogue in the very early years of sound films. From Pittsburgh, PA, she had earned some measure of fame on Broadway, slouching her way through something called “The Baby Cyclone,” a not too well remembered George M. Cohan production. But with her marcelled bob, a “Baby Cyclone Bob,” in fact, she made herself famous along the Rialto, or at least noticed enough to have Hollywood come calling. Looking a bit older than her published birth year would suggest, Moorhead slinked through a seemingly endless parade of “other women,” adulterous wives, over-the-hill gangster's molls, and so on and so forth, all of them performed “mid-Atlantic-style” with plenty of “cahnts” and “yooos” for “cannot” and “you.”

(Photo: Natalie Moorhead waving goodbye to author James Watters and photographer Horst in front of her Montecito home)

Moorhead is probably best remembered for playing a murder victim – yet another gold digger – in the first Thin Man feature in 1934, and although her screen time in that rare Grade A whodunit is customarily brief she makes it stand out. And that is Natalie Moorhead's legacy on screen: she always managed to stand out no matter how impoverished the surroundings. There she was, dripping in fur and faux jewelry and with an icy remark to all of sundry, a veritable Depression-era Theda Bara with a fool or two at her feet.

Off-screen, Moorhead was widowed in 1936 when her husband, noted screen director Alan Crosland, was killed in a car accident. She left films in 1940 – or did films leave her? – and two years later married former Chicago parks commissioner Robert J. Dunham. She was left a widow for the second time in 1949 but then in the 1950s she was reintroduced to an old friend, Juan de Garchi Torena, a South American diplomat who had once enjoyed a Hollywood career as Juan Torena. She became Mrs. Torena in 1957 and stayed Mrs. Torena until her death at Montecito, CA, 13 October 1992. As the former screen femme fatale explained to James Watters in 1983: “Our life has been so rich in so many ways that the acting was only part of our happiness.”

Discarded Lovers (Tower, 1932) PD ***
Actress Irma Gladden (Natalie Moorhead) may be beloved by her adoring public but she makes only enemies in her private life. Take her husband, for example, Andre Leighton (Roy D'Arcy), who still carries a torch for his estranged wife but whom she only agrees to kiss when cameras are rolling; not to mention poor Rex Forsythe (Jason Robards), a dialogue director (now there's an early silent screen function!) who may kiss her whenever he pleases but who knows very well than he isn't the only man in her life. And when Mrs. Sibley (Sharon Lynne) comes to warn her rival to keep her manicured paws off Mr. Sibley Irma gleefully substitutes Rex's portrait with one of Sibley (Robert Frazer), just to rub the poor woman's nose in it. If anyone deserves to become a whodunit victim it is Irma Gladden and 25 minutes or so into Discarded Lovers, she is indeed found very much dead in an automobile by her lecherous chauffeur (Jack Trent). But who actually done it?

Top billed Natalie Moorhead got to play what she never became in real life in Discarded Lovers, a movie star. Okay, the movie studio is not exactly Paramount or MGM but Tower Productions, the creation of someone named Joseph Simmonds but mostly run by the ubiquitous Sigmund Neufeld, who would later have a lot of sway with PRC. In fact, Sigmund's prolific brother, PRC regular Sam Newfield, directed his first of literally hundreds of programmers for Tower, albeit it was The Important Witness (33), with vixens Noel Francis and Dorothy Burgess, and not Discarded Lovers, Tower's initial release. The present film was instead helmed by another poverty row mainstay, Fred Newmeyer, a jack-of-all-trades kind of director who served mainly as a traffic cop. He certainly didn't do much for the performances here, which ranged from wildly over-the-top (silent screen villain Roy D'Arcy) to strictly amateur night (Barbara Weeks, whose father, George Weeks, handled the one Tower production not arranged by Neufeld, The Big Bluff [1933]). Natalie Moorhead, though, is fine in her standard femme fatale mood and gets to parade a handsome wardrobe that was no doubt her very own. Orbiting her are stalwarts of the genre, including J. Farrell MacDonald as the police chief and Fred Kelsey as the numbskull sergeant. Nominal leading man Russel Hopton, who actually became a dialogue director in real life, is a bit too phlegmatic for heroics but also never interrupts the flow. Discarded Lovers is certainly not great art but remains a serviceable little pre-code whodunit well worth dialing up on a rainy day.

The Stoker (Allied Pictures, 1932) PD ***
In the opening shot of The Stoker, businessman Dick Martin (Monte Blue) lovingly fondles a portrait of his wife, Vera. The face looking back, however, is that of Natalie Moorhead and you just known what poor Dick is in for. And, sure enough, Vera, who wears the pants in the family, and holds the purse strings as well, is off to Paris for a quickie divorce so she can marry Dick's attorney (Richard Tucker). A dejected Dick, who has lost not only his wife but his once-thriving business as well, signs on as a stoker on a steamship bound for South America. There he meets the exotic Margarita (Dorothy Burgess), and although at first they don't get along, it is she who bails him out of jail once he gets in trouble with the law in Nicaragua. As it turns out Margarita is the daughter of a local planter and she soon agrees to marry Dick in the hopes that he may be able to enlist the US marines if the plantation is attacked by bandits. Dick is disgusted when he learns the truth of her machinations but changes his mind after learning that she loves him for himself and not only for who he is. And, sure enough, Dick is indeed able to summon help from the marines when the plantation find itself attacked.

Needless to say, Natalie Moorhead's role here is little more than a cameo but her mere presence helps establishing who and what her character really is. You never had to spell it out: Natalie was trouble, either as a wife or a mistress. The nominal leading lady, Dorothy Burgess, usually played Bad Girls herself, notably the vixenish Tonia Maria in the Academy Award-winning In Old Arizona (1928), and unlike Natalie's her presence in The Stoker keeps the audience guessing. Monte Blue is at all times believable and since The Stoker is based on a Peter B. Kyne original, the story at least has a bit of depth. Director Chester M. Franklin, perhaps best remembered for helming a series of fairy tales cast  entirely with child actors, performs his tasks with customary skill but is somewhat defeated by the film's meagre budget. The Stoker was issued by M.H. "Max" Hoffman, formerly of Tru-Art and mainly a purveyor of Hoot Gibson westerns. But Allied and Hoffman had pretensions and among the 1932 releases where versions of Thackeray's Vanity Fair, with Myrna Loy, and Flaubert's "Madame Bovary," in modern dress and retitled Unholy Love. Yet despite those films, and the popular A Shriek in the Night (1932), with Ginger Rogers, Allied went the way of nearly all the early sound independents and was defunct by 1934.

Love Bound (Peerless Pictures, 1932) PD ***
His family nearly destroyed by a gold digging blackmailer, Dick Randolph (Jack Mulhall) follows the lady, Verna Wilson (Natalie Moorhead), aboard a liner to Europe. Dick's plan is to have the family chauffeur (Dick Alexander) pretend to be an oil millionaire in order to catch Verna in the act, so to speak. Things, however, take an unexpected turn when Verna not only falls in love with Dick, who she assumes is penniless, but breaks up with her latest boyfriend, Juan (Roy D'Arcy), who wants in on the expected windfall. Verna is ready to tell Dick the truth when the couple is interrupted by the former's ex-husband, Jimmy (Lynton Brent), who seeks revenge for having been locked up on her behalf. A fight breaks out and Juan shoots and kills Jimmy. A chagrined Verna agrees to return to New York and clear the Randolph family name.

“I'm always interested in how men acquire their wealth,” purrs Natalie Moorhead to Dick Alexander, whom she is mistakenly believes is a Texas oilman. And that is how we have come to know and love Natalie: as a woman with few, if any, scruples. But this time she does surprise us by actually possessing a conscience and, even more important, a heart. Not that screenwriters James Gilber, George Plympton (of the serials) and Robert F. Hill (who also directed) make any of this the least bit plausible, you understand, and why Natalie should fall so instantly in love with Jack Mulhall remains a mystery. But fall in love she does and that fact allows her to at least attempt to create a multi-faceted character. And that is really all we could possibly expect from a cheap little potboiler like Love Bound. Produced by small-time Peerless Pictures, a New York-based company owned by one Sam Efrus that issued only eight releases 1931-1936, the drama was resurrected in 1949 with the completely misleading title “Murder on the High Seas.”

Gigolettes of Paris (Equitable, 1933) PD **

Naïve Suzanne (Madge Bellamy), who works in aboutique, finds herself installed in a posh apartment by the smooth-talking Alfred Valraine (Theodore von Eltz), but he dumps her when she keeps mentioning marriage and honeymoon. Taking the engagement ring with him, cheapskate Alfred then returns to his wealthy fiancee, Diane (Natalie Moorhead), who soon enough becomes Mrs. Valraine. When Suzanne, who is now a chantoose in a nightclub, spots Diane with what she still considers her ring, she sets a trap for the philandering Valraine that threatens to ruin his otherwise none-too-successful marriage.

(Mr. and Mrs. Verlaine in a rare agreeable mood)

Natalie Moorhead is her icy self in this very low-budget effort from a company calling itself Equitable, and easily steals every scene that she is in. Not too difficult a task, really, considering that Madge Bellamy, fresh from her zombie-fied performance in White Zombie (1932), was arguably Hollywood's worst actress. Or at least high on the list. Theodore von Eltz did slippery very well – and it is too bad that his only memorable screen role was a mere bit, if an important one, in The Big Sleep (1946) – and Gilbert Roland enjoyed a lengthy Hollywood career playing gigolos like his character here. But Gigolettes of Paris is still a tough piece of hokum to plow through today, enlivened all-too briefly by former Wampas Baby Star Molly O'Day as Madge Bellamy's wisecracking friend.

The Forgotten (Invincible, 1933) PD **
The forgotten man of the title is one Papa Strauss (Lee Kohlmar), an immigrant who has made a fortune with a dye manufacturing company. But Papa's two daughters-in-law (Natalie Moorhead and Natalie Kingston) convinces their husbands (Selmer Jackson and Leon Waycoff [Ames]) to put the exasperating old dear in a retirement home. They do the dirty deed while caring daughter Lina (June Clyde) is away but Papa is quickly bored and to amuse himself stars a competing dye company with a formula invented by Lina's chemist boyfriend (William Collier, Jr.) The ungrateful sons and their snooty wives eventually learn that the company's chief competitor is their own father, who obviously still has it in him, and regret their behavior.

(According to the dearl old Imdb, "This film is believed lost. Please check your attic." Well, you really don't have to; just go to archive.com and voila!)

Imagine that your daughter-in-law is Natalie Moorhead! You may as well wish just head for that nursing home right off the bat. Especially if you smoke a stinky pipe when Natalie demands that you switch to a more upscale stogie. Yep, that is all there is to this little misfire from Invincible, the one half of the independent Chesterfield-Invincible combine that filmed their little programmers at Universal. Lee Kohlmar, from Furth, Germany, who had been around in Hollywood for awhile by 1933 and was best known for playing Louis XVI in D.W. Griffith's Orphans of the Storm (1921), does his stereotypical Jewish immigrant to near-exhaustion but is still upstaged by another accented old timer, Prague-born Otto Lederer, whose penultimate film this was. Natalie Moorhead, meanwhile, is her usual haughty self but at least she appears to be faithful to stodgy Selmer Jackson, if that is anything to brag about. The other daughter-in-law is Natalie Kingston, who had played Jane in the part-yelling serial Tarzan the Tiger (1929).

Curtain at Eight (Majestic Pictures Corp., 1934) PD * (Natalie Moorhead's scene: ***)

All the ladies just love matinee idol Wylie Thornton (Paul Cavanagh), including, believe it or not, a female chimpanzee. But unbeknownst to ingenue Anice Cresmer (Marion Shilling), Thornton's most recent fling, her older sister Lola (Dorothy Mackaill), or heiress Doris Manning (Ruthelma Stevens), who is going to bankroll Wylie's latest play in payment for playing the female lead, the actor's secretary (Natalie Moorhead), is actually his wife. And Mrs. Yhornton is getting mighty tired of playing second fiddle to his career and tells him so in no uncertain terms.The chimp, meanwhile, kisses his portrait while brandishing a pistol (!), Lola warns him to stop seeing her sister, and everyone is shocked when the lights go out and a shot is fired during a birthday celebration. Surprise! When the lights return, the birthday boy, Thornton, is found very much dead. But who done it? Meticulous policeman Jim Hanvey (top-billed C. Aubrey Smith) finally solves the mystery, but not before his dimwitted partner, Gallagher (Sam Hardy), has arrested most of the cast, excluding the chimp, and several suspects have proven to be red herrings by turning up all too dead themselves.

I had a hard time awarding stars for this whodunit which survives in a somewhat truncated form (the American Film Institute lists a running time of 74 minutes while the version viewed only ran to 61). The suicide of one character, for example, appears out of nowhere and we aren't even quite sure whothe killer really was. Could it have been the chimp as Detective C. Aubrey Smith would have everyone believe? Really? Natalie Moorhead, meanwhile, enjoys one of her best scenes in Curtain at Eight when fifteen minutes into the proceedings we learn that she is really Wylie Thornton's wife and not just his secretary. The couple emerges from what has obviously been a sexual encounter, he getting dressed while she is still lounging in a double bed – yes, a double bed! – wearing very little and her hair in a bit of disarray. Another first for Natalie who emerges looking far younger without the tightly marceled bob. And a triumph for the lax pre-code censorship. As Wylie continues to dress, she takes time out to fling insults at him, calling him a “cackling boudoir rooster” and a “flannel-mouthed Romeo.” It is a great scene for both performers and Natalie's mirth as her husband is forced to lie to his latest paramour over the telephone is infectious. Unfortunately, apart from this one scene, the most memorable aspect of Curtain at Eight is that gun-toting chimp

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Run by veteran poverty row entrepreneur Phil Goldstone, Majestic Pictures Corp. was a small-scale company with aspirations, and aspirations that nearly came to fruition. Curtain at Eight, for example, played an MGM flagship theater in New York City and was renamed “Backstage Mystery” so as not to be confused with Metro's major undertaking of the year, the all-star Dinner at Eight. But Goldstone's real coup – or was it the artistic head of the company, Larry Darmour? – was to hire major genre stars Fay Wray and Lionel Atwill to appear in the still-fondly remembered The Vampire Bat (1932). Majestic also produced a version of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1934), starring, of all people, 1920s flapper Colleen Moore as Hester Prynne, but the less said about that one the better. Like most of the early sound independents Majestic left the field 1934-1935, when double-bills became the norm in the industry, but Darmour went on to produce scores of B-Movies, mostly westerns.