A Lady of Chance (1928)

A Lady of Chance is a 1928 MGM silent film starring Norma Shearer. It’s a lighthearted comic crime melodrama/romantic melodrama.

A Lady of Chance was shot as a silent film. By this time audiences were losing interest in silent films so MGM added some dialogue scenes. That soundtrack is apparently lost so the movie now survives only as a silent movie. What we get on the DVD is a modern score - I turned the volume down to zero as quickly as possible. I’ll watch a silent movie with no sound at all rather than endure a modern score.

Dolly Morgan, nicknamed Angel Face (Norma Shearer), is a con artist. She’s working the old badger game. It’s a racket she knows well.

She has a prime sucker lined up. His name is Hammond. Hammond knows that Dolly isn’t exactly a respectable girl. That’s OK, he doesn’t want a respectable girl. He wants a bit of fun. He knows that girls like Dolly don’t give away their favours without getting a few presents in return. Of course he doesn’t know just how much his fun is going to cost him this time. It’s going to cost him ten grand (an immense amount of money in 1928). He’ll have to pay up because if his wife finds out he’s in big trouble. She is not a very understanding woman.

Dolly is working this racket on her own, but unluckily for her she runs into two former partners-in-crime, Brad (Lowell Sherman) and Gwen (Gwen Lee). They want a piece of the action. Of course they intend to double-cross Dolly and she intends to double-cross them. When it comes to double crosses Dolly is an expert. She ends up holding the ten grand but she will have to make a hasty departure.

Dolly has a new sucker lined up, Steve Crandall (Johnny Mack Brown). This could be it, the big score that every girl in Dolly’s line of work hopes will come along. Steve is a cement tycoon which sounds promising enough but when he tells her about the plantation back home, in the South, she knows she’s hit the jackpot. Ten grand is chicken feed compared to a score like this.

And the best thing is that Steve is as dumb as a rock. He even offers to marry her. She can’t wait to see that plantation. When she arrives in Steve’s home town there will of course be some surprises in store for her.

Dolly has been thrown for a loop and now the last thing she needs is for Brad and Gwen to turn up. Which of course they do.

While it’s not a conventional formulaic romantic comedy this is a movie that combines comedy with romance. It is amusing, and it is very romantic.

The acting is pretty good. Johnny Mack Brown makes Steve suitably innocent and naïve but he’s so well-meaning we can’t despise him.

Lowell Sherman and Gwen Lee are fun as likeable rogues. Gwen Lee in fact is a delight. Lowell Sherman’s reputation hasn’t stood the test of time which is perhaps a little unfair.

Norma Shearer is fine and she manages to sell us on Dolly’s sudden change of heart. It’s a brittle amusing performance. These four main players really work extremely well together. Norma Shearer looks fabulous, which is easy for an actress to do when she has the great Adrian designing her gowns.

Robert Z. Leonard is not a director you’ll find on most people’s great directors lists and he’s not one of the darlings of auteurist critics but he made some extraordinarily good and interesting movies, include the superb 1949 noir The Bribe and the very underrated pre-code Susan Lenox (Her Fall and Rise).

This is a very lightweight movie but it doesn’t pretend to be anything else and it has a breezy charm. Highly recommended if you’re in the mood for something frothy.

The Warner Archive DVD presentation is very good.

I haven’t seen a huge number of Norma Shearer’s films. I want to see more but her movies are remarkably difficult to find. I do highly recommend one of her earlier silent pictures, Lady of the Night (1925), in which she plays dual roles.

Lady of the Night (1925)

Lady of the Night is a 1925 silent melodrama starring Norma Shearer, at that time a rising star. Within a few years she would become a very big star indeed.

It’s the story of two young women of the same age but from very different backgrounds. Both women are played by Norma Shearer.

Florence Banning is the daughter of a wealthy judge and banker. She has just graduated from the most exclusive girls’ school in the city.

Molly Helmer is an orphan, the daughter of a convict, and she has just left reform school. Now she will find work. It’s never actually explicitly stated but we assume she finds work as a prostitute (the title certainly implies that). In any case she is definitely not a respectable woman.

Molly is the girlfriend of 'Chunky' Dunn (George K. Arthur). His profession is never stated but we’re left to assume that he’s involved in petty crime, or he may be Molly’s pimp. He’s a nice guy, but rather awkward and a bit nerdy and he’s hopelessly in love with Molly.

The unlikely link between the two women is Chunky’s pal David Page (Malcolm McGregor). Molly has fallen for David in a big way.

David has come up with an invention which will make safe-cracking much easier. He’s hoping to sell it to a gang of crooks. Molly persuades him to sell it to bankers instead, as an anti-safecracking device. The bankers buy it with Judge Banning being particularly enthusiastic and as a result David gets to meet the judge’s daughter Florence. David and Florence fall instantly in love.

David and Florence want to get married but in the meantime Florence has met Molly and has realised that Molly is in love with David. She doesn’t want to steal David away from Molly. The romantic entanglements have become very messy.

That’s about it for the plot and it could be argued that there’s not quite enough plot even to fill the movie’s very short 70-minute running time. At the end you find yourself waiting for a third act that doesn’t materialise.

Surprisingly the very simplicity of the story becomes its strength. The focus is not on the working out of the romantic entanglements themselves but rather on the people involved. In particular the movie focuses on the two women. Despite being romantic rivals they have a certain mutual respect. Perhaps they see themselves as mirror images of each other, which then explains why it was decided to have both roles played by the same actress.

The acting is much more naturalistic than you might expect in a silent romantic melodrama. Norma Shearer’s performances are quite nuanced, and extremely effective. George K. Arthur is also very good as Chunky. He’s a character who could have been ridiculous and played strictly for laughs but he’s given a certain dignity, and his feelings are taken seriously.

All of the characters are in fact sympathetic. They’re all trying to behave honourably. They don’t really want to hurt anybody. We’d like to see them all end up happy although we wonder how that is going to be possible.

Lady of the Night is a low-key subtle romantic drama. Real people don’t necessarily respond to romantic disappointment by becoming histrionic and there are no histrionics at all in this movie.

Technically it’s quite impressive, especially when both characters played by Norma Shearer are onscreen at the same time. Which was quite tricky in 1925. In some scenes a double is used for Norma Shearer - an unknown young actress by the name of Joan Crawford.

The ending is not what I expected but it works. Highly recommended, especially if you’ve always wondered why Norma Shearer was such a big deal.

The Warner Archive DVD release offers a good transfer and (pleasingly) it uses a proper tinted print. Not everybody likes the way tinting was used in silent movies but I do like it.

A Free Soul (1931)

A Free Soul stars Norma Shearer as Jan Ashe, daughter of famous (and famously drunken) defence attorney Stephen Ashe (Lionel Barrymore). He’s brought her up as a free spirit, oblivious to the petty rules of respectable society. So when she meets the good-looking, sexy and very wicked mob boss, played by Clark Gable, her father has just successfully defended in a murder trial, it doesn’t take much to persuade to dump her decent but irredeemably dull boyfriend (Leslie Howard). She moves in with her handsome gangster boyfriend. Her father enjoys hanging out with mobster Gable and getting drunk in his gambling club, but when Gable announces he’s going to marry Jan dear old dad nearly has apoplexy.

Jan promises to give up her gangster if dad will give up the booze, but he soon starts to backslide, and Jan discovers that while slumming it with bad boys can be fun they can be extraordinarily difficult to get rid of when the novelty wears off. She finds her situation rapidly spiralling out of control, and tragedy naturally ensues.

Barrymore overacts outrageously throughout the film, and even more outrageously in the climactic courtroom scenes, and picked up an Oscar for his performance. Gable’s performance is both menacing and smoulderingly sexy. Shearer is equally sexy, and very convincing in a fairly difficult role. She also gets to wear some extravagantly gorgeous clothes.

The character of Stephen Ashe was based on real-life attorney Earl Rogers, a legend for both his boozing and his courtroom antics. It’s a movie that deals with sexuality, and particularly female sexuality, in a very grown-up and complex way, something the Production Code would soon put a stop to. Despite some excessively melodramatic moments it’s an effective movie that mostly avoids getting bogged down in moral platitudes, and Gable and Shearer certainly sizzle.

Barrymore’s performance is a delight for connoisseurs of over-the-top but gloriously entertaining bad acting. Opinion is divided over the merits of Norma Shearer, but I’m becoming more and more of a fan. An enjoyable pre-code treat.