Love 'Em and Leave 'Em

This is the only chance I have had to see Louise Brooks practice her dancing, and I'm afraid it isn't up to much. If she could dance she wasn't going to give the audiences of this film the opportunity to find out.

This is a reasonable effort - so probably fairly typical for Frank Tuttle. It is a sister vs. sister story - inevitably one is good (Mame Walsh, played carefully by Evelyn Brent) and the other not so good, or rather very, very bad (Janie Walsh, played by Brooks). In between them is Bill Billingsley (an average Lawrence Gray, who had a speciality in heels and sharks).

I can't help but feel that Brent was cheated. She had struggled for several years to get top billing. She achieved it in this film, but hers is largely a thankless - indeed marginal - role. She was thought to be a little old for the part (she was nearing 30), and it must be said that with her flowing locks she could easily have stepped out of a daguerreotype, for all her beauty. Brooks, by contrast looks very modern, and she carries herself in a very 'contemporary' way. There is more than an emotional gulf between these two - and unfortunately Brent falls into it. Brooks steals the film - not by acting (her handling of her gambling problem and her indebtedness is somewhat underwhelming), but by being very, very sexy. Brent was, by contrast, to cripple her remaining years as a star by trying to hard to act the part of a great actress. Her work became ever more serious, and therefore (because her talent had its limits) more stilted, and therefore dated. Sad to say, hard work brought her diminishing returns. I'm not certain that Brooks knew what hard work was, whilst she remained an actress.

This film is elevated from the level of pedestrian drama by its supporting cast, notably Osgood Perkins (Anthony's father, and a first class actor) as the vulpine bookie, though he sometimes looks as though he has swallowed strichnine; also Arthur Donaldson (as a self-important floor manager of the department store where the three main players 'work'). This was a pleasant and undemanding seventy minutes.