Trangression (1931)

Trangression is a 1931 RKO romantic melodrama.

Elsie Maury (Kay Francis) is married to mining engineer Robert Maury (Paul Cavanagh). They live a quiet life in the English countryside until Robert has to spend a year in India for professional reasons. He thinks Elsie would be unhappy in India so he packs her off to Paris where she has friends.

You might think that sending a young beautiful wife, who for a year is going to be a young beautiful lonely wife, to Paris is not the smartest idea and you’d be right. In Paris she meets Don Arturo de Borgus (Ricardo Cortez). Arturo is handsome, dashing and exciting - everything her husband is not. They become involved, although Arturo insists to his friends that the relationship has not yet been actually technically improper.

After a year Elsie receives a telegram. Her husband will be arriving the next day. Elsie is somewhat relieved - she has found Arturo a bit too much of a temptation. Arturo is devastated. He feels he cannot live without her. If only he could persuade her to spend a few days with him at his villa in Spain.

Robert wants to return to England immediately but agrees that Elsie can follow him later. So she goes off to Spain with her handsome Latin Lover. She is playing a dangerous game and she doesn’t know the rules. She is remarkably innocent. She is totally under the spell of Arturo’s romantic aura and cannot see that he is a ruthless womaniser who will tell a woman anything to get her into bed. As you might expect it all goes horribly wrong for her and she might end up with no man at all.

Elsie has another problem - Robert’s moralistic control-freak sister who hates her.

And Robert is disturbed by the changes in Elsie. She now wears make-up, a sure sign of moral laxness.

The plot is pretty basic and it’s all a bit too contrived.

Is there any actress more unfairly neglected than the wonderful Kay Francis? She’s in fine form here as a complex woman who is neither an out-and-out bad girl nor a plaster saint. She’s human and she’s not immune to temptation. Her problem is that she thinks she’s a sophisticated woman of the world when in fact she knows nothing of the big bad world. Kay Francis was one of the great pre-code stars who found the transition to the moralistic atmosphere of the Production Code impossible to negotiate.

And Ricardo Cortez was one of the great male pre-code stars who had the same problem. He specialised in playing dangerous men who led women into temptation and those roles just dried up completely thanks to the Production Code. Two great careers blighted by the Code. Cortez is excellent here - you can imagine women finding his dangerous charm hard to resist.

It’s the performances of Kay Francis and Ricardo Cortez that make this film worth watching. Aside from that it has a few problems. Robert is such a bore that we can’t possibly care if he loses his wife or not. Arturo is a cad with no complexity at all. Elsie’s sister-in-law is a one-note interfering busybody. There’s also a villainous servant, and he’s pure villainy and cowardice. The only character we can care about is Elsie, and she’s so impossibly naïve that we feel exasperation rather than sympathy.

The clunkiness of early talkies is often exaggerated but this one really is a bit clunky.

The pre-code content consists of the idea (that would never have been countenanced once the Production Code started to be enforced) that maybe adultery is something that can be forgiven.

Trangression doesn’t quite come off mostly due to the weak script and the fact that the characters are so badly underwritten that they just don’t engage us the way that they should. Worth a look but don’t get your hopes up too high.

This movie is included in the five-movie Spanish Verdice Pre-Code RKO Volume 2 DVD boxed set. All five films are in English with removable Spanish subtitles and the transfers are fine.