Bad Girl (1931)

A man and woman, skeptical about romance, nonetheless fall in love and are wed, but their lack of confidence in the opposite sex haunts their marriage.

Director:

Frank Borzage

Writers:

Viña Delmar (novel), Brian Marlow (play)

Stars:

James Dunn, Sally Eilers, Minna Gombell

Won 2 Oscars. Another 1 nomination.

Cast

Complete credited cast:
James Dunn	...	Eddie Collins
Sally Eilers	...	Dorothy Haley
Minna Gombell	...	Edna Driggs

Storyline

A mug and a jane: Dorothy knows that every guy is going to make a pass at her; Eddie knows that every gal wastes her money on good times. He's saving to open a repair shop. When the two of them meet, they can't believe they get along. One evening he leaves her waiting in the rain; she finds his apartment and reads him the riot act. They end up spooning and napping until 4 AM. She's afraid of her brother, who's her guardian, so Eddie figures she should tell her brother that she's getting married the next morning. Dorothy tries out the story but knows Eddie won't show up. It's the first of a series of promises, fears, miscalculations, and hard knocks. Where will they end up?

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Plot Keywords:

apartment | marriage | new york city | brooklyn new york city | hyperactive child | 

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Taglines:

VINA DELMAR'S novel of New York Life - BAD GIRL

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Genres:

Drama | Romance

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Certificate:

Passed

Details

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Release Date:

13 September 1931 (USA)

Also Known As:

Barn av idag

Company Credits

Production Co:

Fox Film Corporation

Technical Specs

Runtime:

90 min

Sound Mix:

Mono (Western Electric System)

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

The man in front of the candy shop is played by Sally Eilers' brother Bud Eilers.

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Goofs

At 39:38, shadow of boom mic drifts across the wall.

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Quotes

Dorothy Haley: I gotta go upstairs now. You see, my mother's dead, and my brother's boss of the house. He gets sore when I stay out late. You know, he's careful for me. But as Edna says, you can't watch a girl hard enough to keep her good if she don't want to be.

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Connections

Version of Manhattan Heartbeat (1940)

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Soundtracks

Come On Baby and Beg For It
(uncredited)
Written by James F. Hanley

User Reviews

yuk!

Borzage is a film-maker whose reputation has ebbed and flowed quite dramatically over time. And perhaps not surprisingly. His work represents, even more clearly than that of Ford or Capra, a combination of all that is the best and all that is the worst about US film.

In the late twenties and early thirties, he was looked at as the brightest hope of the US cinema and probably deserves the accolade of being the winner of more undeserved Oscars than anyone else before the advent of Ang Lee. Subsequently his reputation plummeted (as did the quality of his films) but he is now once again riding relatively high in critical esteem, at least in respect of his early films.

But even these are a vary mixed bunch. There are Borzage films I greatly admire, there are several which i Find irritating (most of the Gaynor-Farrell films) but this particular 1931 film I absolutely detest.

Its reputation for "realism" (in the sense of naturalism, that rare bird in US cinema) is entirely unjustified. Any comparison for instance with King Vidor's excellent The Crowd (1928) reveals immediately how spurious and fake the "realism" is here. One reviewer talks of ordinary people not being treated with "condescension". They are in fact treated here as complete and utter idiots and the entire plot revolves around perfectly stupid misunderstandings that are only possible because of the characters' extraordinary obtuseness. This is in turn set off by a fake naivety which is supposed to be charming but is just cringe-makingly sentimental. I have difficulty in imagining any treatment that could be more condescending...and this makes it, to my mind, not just irritatingly sentimentalised (as in the case of the Gaynor-Farrell films) but virtually a kind of pornography that demeans everybody associated with it.

That such a film should be set during an economic depression and, ignoring any of the real problems of the time, should concentrate on such trivialities may in part be due to the fact, as another reviewer points out, to the fact that the original novel was written some eight years earlier but, in the context of 1931, it is absolutely grotesque although typical enough of the US cinema's reaction to the depression.

It is in part just the familiar Hollywood problem with "truth". While The Crowd was hated by the studios and unsuccessful with the public (in practice the first tends to condition the second rather than vice versa), this saccharine piece of junk won another Oscar for its director.