Man Bait (1952)

Saturday is traditionally "Take Out the Trash" Day.

Man Bait (aka The Last Page)(Terence Fisher, 1952) Even British noirs are a bit more refined than those in the States, as lurid as they try to make them in their marketing strategies. Take Man Bait, which—as one might suspect—is not the first or last time that title has been used in the history of cinema. It holds the distinction of being the first film of the Hammer Studio to be directed by the director who would become most associated with it, and who would direct the best films of the studios' output, Terence Fisher.

Now, we've all got to start somewhere, and Fisher does a fairly decent job of keeping the movie cruising along and maintaining a slightly tawdry air. The script is by the fellow who wrote the stage play "Dial 'M' for Murder" and one can see little similarities in style: wronged people, compromised positions, the doting yet stalwart "third wheel", conflicting truths and the telling little detail that gives all away despite having no significance whatsoever. It's just the genders are reversed, and for that reason, the stakes seem a lot less crucial.

Pity poor store manager John Harman (George Brent) of Pearson's Rare Books on Oxford Street. He works relentlessly, with little time off, and he has an invalid wife with a heart condition. The man is a saint. Why, the worst thing the man does in a day is to reprimand blond, dishy clerk Ruby Bruce (Diana Dors) for clocking in late. She says it won't happen again, but it will, and there will be consequences. 

Those consequences involve her lack of judgment and an incident that occurs later in the shop when she spots a sharp, Jeff Hart (Peter Reynolds) trying to shop-lift a rare and expensive book. Now, Hart is a grifter and a cad at selling a line. He makes Ruby promise not to report the incident...and promises to meet him at a club later, after work. The girl has issues. But, she still is available for working after-hours with the manager.

Harman and Ruby work late, with her in her off-the-shoulder party frock. He reminds her not to be late in the morning, and the two seem to have put the day's earlier animosity behind them. How the kiss happens, neither one of them can remember, but it results in a rip in her blouse. Harman becomes apologetic, and promises to give her the funds for a new one, and Ruby goes off on her date.

Hart awaits her at the club, ready to be on the make, and sets the mood by letting her know that she's late, and the story comes out. And he puts it in Ruby's head that she can get much more out of her boss than just the cost of a blouse, if she plays her cards right. And he'll tell her just how to play it.

Harman is planning a trip with his wife, their first vacation in years, and assistant Stella Tracy (Marguerite Chapman) is only too happy for him. She has turned down better paying jobs in the past, but feels obligated to Harman as, even though he is completely unaware of it, she admires him and secretly loves him. She doesn't know what happened between him and Ruby, but she notices that the girl is spending more and more time in the office.

That's because she's blackmailing Harman, and, with Hart's coaching, she is demanding more and more from Harman, even going so far as to threaten to write a letter to his wife, telling her about the incident. He can do nothing but comply, but he is outraged by it, and he can't fire the girl or everything will come out. He's trapped.

Well, it wouldn't get any good unless things got extremely out-of-hand, and they do, it short order, with Harman ultimately becoming a fugitive from justice, and a rather ingenious way to be shown for book-sellers to hide a body. One does not find this very enjoyable, though, as the supposed innocent party is not all that innocent, even if he is not ultimately guilty of what transpires.

Star George Brent was a serious actor—he had done eight films with Bette Davis and you have to be on your "A" game with her. But, here, he gets a "D" or "D-". Maybe he didn't like the material, maybe he was playing beneath his gifts, but those gifts are on short display, as he plays his put-upon exec like he'd just read his lines and didn't think about what they meant. It's a flat emotionless performance that has all the sincerity of reading a phone-book. And when he does have to emote, he goes "0" to "60" in half-a-tick, and then forgets that he just yelled. He makes Man Bait no fun at all.

The rest of the cast isn't much better—Reynolds is too fey to be slick and Chapman goes for the Joan Crawford section of the theater. Surprisingly, the best thing about Man Bait is the bait itself. Diana Dors is still very early in her career at this point, but, at least there's subtlety in what she does, and any conflicting emotions about her character's actions just keeps you guessing. She's terrific in this and you miss her when she goes away 3/4 of the way through the film. Dors was always touted as being "Britain's answer to Marilyn Monroe." But, that hardly seems fair. The camera certainly loved Monroe more, but Dors was consistently a better actress.

Baby Face

Baby Face  (Alfred Green, 1933) The movie Baby Face is notorious for a bunch of reasons. It is "Pre-Code," that period of film-making between the introduction of sound (in 1927) and 1934 (the introduction of Shirley Temple) where Hollywood was aggressively flirting with more mature subject matter, to the point where religious groups particularly the Catholic Legion of Decency started fingering their beads in worry. Horror films became more explicit, gangster films started to rise in popularity with the one-two punch of The Great Depression and the Prohibition Era, and branched off to a sequel genre, the prison film.

And then there was sex. That subject crossed all genres. Even if the film was a cautionary tale about loose behavior you couldn't actually SHOW that loose behavior lest it then influence the behavior you're being warned about. It's the cinematic equivalent of restricting your sex education class to the subject of "abstinence."

As is usually the case with these things, "The Code" was a way to tamp down permissive, or even progressive, behavior in the movies—producers were persuaded to follow a path that was straight and narrow-minded, and so there was watchfulness for subversive behavior, political discontent, and overt sexuality. Somehow, the Marx brothers got past all that.

But, Baby Face didn't. Like a lot of pre-code films, once the Hays Office had their way, the most objectionable bits were excised like a ruptured appendix. The lucky ones were re-distributed with the shorter running times. The unlucky ones were simply re-made, sometimes scant months after the release of the original, and, with any luck, the original wasn't "filed" in the Hudson River, where in the more permissive 1980's, they started to crop up in home video releases. Baby Face was found at the Library of Congress, a "dupe negative" had survived uncut and it was first screened in 2004. 

What they saw was Barbara Stanwyck starring as Lily Powers, a waitress/bartender at the speakeasy of her corrupt father (Robert Barrat). Lily has grown up tough, not for the least reason is that dear old dad had been using her as a chief draw to keep his business going, throwing men her way since she was 14. She's contemptuous of men, and why not? The dregs of society come through her father's door and she treats their low expectations of her with a biting sarcasm that only makes them weaker. "All the kindness and gentleness in me has been killed," she says at one point. And it's been a death of a thousand cuts, every grope, every grab, every compromise. She's trapped with no way out.

But, there is one door, and one day, a potential mentor walks through it—Cragg (Alphonse Ethier), a cobbler, with a bent toward philosophy, manages to break through her hard exterior with a book he insists she reads, written by Nietzsche. He tells her that she already has the weapons and the drive ("her potentialities") to get ahead in the world.

"A woman, young, beautiful, like you, can get anything she wants in the world. Because you have Power over men! But you must use men! Not let them use you. You must be a master! Not a slave. Look, here, Nietzsche says, "All life, no matter how we idealize it, is nothing more nor less than exploitation." That's what I'm telling you! Exploit yourself! Go to some big city where you will find opportunities. Use men! Be strong! Defiant! Use men! To get the things you want."

And so she does. She kicks the sawdust of the speakeasy off her shoes and leaves the night-crawlers behind, moving to the big city and sets aim on conquering the world of commerce, finagling her way (if one can use the term) into getting a job in the secretarial pool and sleeping, and blackmailing her way up the chain of command (Interesting to see John Wayne show up as one of her early disposable conquests—it's the only time these two power-houses worked together in their careers, and, of course, Stanwyck walks all over him, so early in his career).

Set to the songs "St. Louis Blues" and the newly popularized hit "Baby Face," Baby Face deconstructs the pot-boiler to bare essentials, under-pinning it with a philosophical base (Hitler was coming to power at the time, using the same sort of philosophy) and the screen-writers (from a story by one Mark Canfield) are street-smart and uncompromising in how Lily plays the middle-management suck-up's until she finally bags the big prize—the wealthy scion (George Brent) of the bank's founder.

If there's anything wrong with Baby Face, it might be that the writers are a little too fond of the double entendre's they spew out, accompanied by a punctuating eye-roll. They and the director go to that well a few too many times (to the point where my eyes started to instinctively roll), but there are so many surprises, so many chances being taken, that you give the movie a lot of latitude in taking things so far. And Stanwyck is always a joy to watch, even this early in her career. She is one of the great (great!) screen actors to come out of the pre-code era and she had the ability to grow and mature beyong just holding the attention of the camera.

Oh. And Mark Canfield, who wrote the story? He sold the treatment to Warner Brothers for a single dollar. Then skipped the studio to make a name for himself over at 20th Century Fox. His real name, by the way, was Darryl F. Zanuck.