Man Trouble

Eloise1.5

People always accuse Deliverance and suchlike of perpetuating the "rural folk are inbred weirdos" trope but maybe this is where it all started. The two leads go out to stay on a farm with a nice innocent older couple who say they could never have children but instead they have dream children, which all comes up because they decide that Dorothy Mackaill "looks like Josie", their imaginary daughter. Sounds heartless to mock this, but it's the movie's fault. The Ritrovato notes suggest there are complexities and "moral ambiguities in the characters" but let's not go overboard here: narratively and technically this is one of the films that gives early sound a bad name.I did, however, like the dark fog at the docks and at the proper gangster scenes. Fox was certainly capable of some great output and I've been much impressed by other things I've seen at past festivals. The best thing about this screening is the background of the print restoration: print material was lost in the vault fire of 1937 and it existed only as a nitrate print. There were splices after every shot and plenty of bloops, we heard from UCLA's Jillian Borders. This version has been freshly (as in 2024) restored and was nice and shaky. Sometimes the sound showed up in the projection.EDIT: I just remembered a great line of dialogue, when Milton Sills says "A wife? Why pay for a Ford when I can get Rolls Royces for free", and I wonder if Paul Newman saw this film before he made his slightly grotesque romantic comment about Joanne Woodward.

Pamela Hutchinson2.0

Nice to be nice.

matthiasellis4.0

Wow, WHAT an unforgettable experience and historical document. Four stars for that alone—saw on a recently “restored” print that came from the only surviving nitrate workprint that UCLA just cleaned up. As close to being at a screening of dailies in the 30s as I think I’ll ever have—sound cuts (before the restoration EVERY cut was spliced and thus clipped the soundtrack, apparently the framerate would fall out of sync at the end), missing transitions, random black frames in the middle of scenes. And the picture itself absolutely had me. By no means some missing masterpiece or anything but a quintessential pre-code enticer with everything from a gangster shootout on backlit foggy docks to suggestive pre-marital sex (we don’t see them in bed together but a 10 minute subplot revolves around our two to-be lovers sharing a bedroom under the guise of a sham marriage), violence and a shockingly heavy scene of sexual assault for the 1930s. By the film’s climax you knew what was likely coming and yet were hoping for the fantasy to be fulfilled; Hollywood magic at its best and in pure form. Gonna be thinking about this one for a while and I really hope they let someone put this out on disc soon.