Faithless (1932)

Faithless is a 1932 MGM pre-code movie and it effectively marks the end of Tallulah Bankhead’s Hollywood career. There’ll be more to say about Miss Bankhead’s career later.

Faithless starts out as a breezy comedy of manners among the rich and the famous. It turns into a gritty harrowing social realist drama about survival during the Depression. I would assume that audiences were not expecting that sudden dramatic turn which may be why it failed to ignite the box office. And this is not a movie one would have expected from MGM.

Carol Morgan (Tallulah Bankhead) is a spoilt rich girl. She is accustomed to getting whatever she wants. She wants the handsome Bill Wade (Robert Montgomery). He wants her as well. The problem is money. Carol is fabulously rich. Bill has a moderately well-paid advertising job. He insists that they will have to live on his income. Carol thinks that’s the most absurd thing she’s ever heard.

They finally decide they will marry and they celebrate their decision by sleeping together. But that money is still a problem and the wedding is cancelled.

Bill had assumed that once they had had sex she would naturally agree to marriage on his terms. What kind of girl would sleep with a man and then refuse his offer of marriage? Carol for her part had assumed that once they had had sex he would naturally agree to marriage on her terms. What kind of man would sleep with a girl and then not marry her?

It’s the start of an on-again off-again relationship.

Meanwhile fate has nasty surprises in store for both of them. Carol’s fortune has been swallowed up by the Depression. She is now penniless. Now surely she’ll have to marry Bill on his terms, but she doesn’t. Bill loses his job. He’s penniless as well. Their initial problems were caused by too much money; their later problems are caused by too little money.

From this point on I will be mentioning some of the plot twists because it’s impossible to discuss this movie without doing so. If you’re super-spoilerphobic bear that in mind. I will certainly not be revealing the ending and the great thing about pre-code movies is that you can never predict the endings.

Carol lives off her friends for a while and then becomes a kept woman. Mr Blainey (Hugh Herbert) isn’t really a monster but he’s paying her for services rendered and he expects her to render those services, which she obviously does.

Carol and Bill meet again, drift apart again, meet again.

Carol ends up working as a street prostitute. But there are more plots twists to come.

This movie is about as pre-code as a pre-code movie could get and then some. Once the Production Code started to be enforced in 1934 this movie could only have one possible ending. Carol would have to die to atone for her sins. She has committed no less than three major moral sins any one of which would require her to die under the Code.

But that’s not what happens here. This movie doesn’t just cheerfully ignore conventional moral codes, it confronts them head on. It even dares to suggest that the criminalisation of prostitution is far more evil than prostitution itself.

Carol is not presented as a bad woman. She does what she has to do. This movie even goes so far as to suggest that since she has very good reasons for her actions her flaunting of the traditional moral codes actually makes her a more truly moral person than those who enforce those rules.

Tallulah Bankhead had been a huge star on Broadway. Paramount signed her to a contract but her attempts to establish herself as a film star failed for various reasons. She’s a fine actress but she is a bit stagey and she does project a rather brittle persona. Paramount did not quite know how to use her. Faithless was made at MGM and clearly they weren’t sure how to use her either. Her career ended with two melodramas, this one and Devil and the Deep. Brittle social comedies might have been more her forte. Perhaps she should have been making the kinds of movies that Kay Francis made.

I suspect that Miss Bankhead’s problem is that she never found a director who knew how to utilise her unusual talents properly, the way Josef von Sternberg knew how to utilise Marlene Dietrich’s unusual talents. Bankhead made too many movies with second-rate directors. She did make a half-hearted attempt to return to movies in the 1940s and of course won acclaim for her performance in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat. Having said all that, on the whole I like her performance here.

It’s also interesting in that Carol really is a nasty spoilt bitch at the beginning but her personality change is convincing. She was a nasty spoilt bitch because she had zero actual life experience. When she gets some life experience she changes, which can happen. It’s called growing up.

I’m not a Robert Montgomery fan and this movie did not change my opinion.

Faithless works because it doesn’t pull its punches. It’s not afraid to show us the full range of the miseries and the desperation caused by the Depression, it’s not afraid to go full-bore melodrama and it’s not afraid to be extraordinary sexually frank even by pre-code movies. It has its flaws but it hits hard and it’s highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed a couple of other Tallulah Bankhead pre-code movies - Devil and the Deep (1932) and The Cheat (1931) - and they’re worth seeing.