Matchstick Women

Hollywood history is filled with bad takes. The most famous is probably the assessment of Fred Astaire after his first screen test at RKO: "Can't act. Can't sing. Balding. Can dance a little." That's so breathtakingly off the rails you just have to hang your head and laugh. It makes director Mervyn LeRoy's opinion of Bette Davis look positively even-handed. He didn't think she could act. His conviction in this was so strong that he actively marginalized her part in their only film together, Three On a Match (1932). In his defense, Davis was about ten or twelve films away from stardom at that point, with her roles in pre-Code films being almost entirely marginal. She was often grossly miscast. It's not for nothing that Robert Aldrich cribbed footage for Baby Jane Hudson's adult career in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? from Davis's pre-Code film, Ex-Lady and Parachute Jumper, both made after Three On a Match. Perhaps on the advice of Davis herself, Aldrich picked those two films as her very worst performances. How much of this is on Davis and how much of this is on her earliest directors is open to debate, but it's hard not to cringe at her Southern accent in Parachute Jumper. What is most surprising about Three On a Match, then, is not that it squanders Bette Davis. She was consistently being squandered in her early films. Rather it is surprising that it also squanders its ostensible star, Joan Blondell. Blondell was top billed, and the film is categorically slanted toward her character and her rise from streetwise reform-school kid to high society paramour and wife. But LeRoy had eyes for his third lead actress, Ann Dvorak, who seizes the film away from her costars with a twitchy descent into degradation of the sort that would eventually ignite Davis's own stardom in Of Human Bondage two years later. Dvorak devours her part, vacillating between amoral social climber to reluctant kidnapper to trapped gangster's accomplice to strung out coke fiend. LeRoy abets her performance by filming her in the style of a madwoman from some silent melodrama.

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Cops and Robbers

James Cagney in G-Men (1935)

While I was discussing gangster films with my long suffering partner a couple of nights ago, I asked her to name a famous bank robber off the top of her head. Her response was "Bonnie and Clyde." She could have named John Dillinger, I suppose, or Pretty Boy Floyd, or maybe even D. B. Cooper, but the thing about all of these names is that they are in the past, and all of them have been subsumed into American folklore. There have been countless films about these characters. The lion's share of these people lived during the Great Depression, and one of the reasons that they became famous, became folk anti-heroes of a kind, is because the economic calamity following the Wall Street crash of 1929 undermined the faith in American capitalism. Banks were villains to most folks. For a brief period, the idea that the United States might follow Russia into communism was more than just a leftist fantasy. It's more difficult to name famous bank robbers who worked after the Great Depression, because America successfully engineered a stable capitalist society from the New Deal and demonized bank robbers in films. Apart from D. B. Cooper, who is mostly famous because he was never caught and who remains an enigma, I couldn't name you a bank robber who worked during the last fifty years. Willie Sutton is probably the last great bank robber of the public imagination, mostly because he was famously quoted as robbing banks "Because that's where the money is." It's harder to rob banks these days, and most transactions are electronic anymore, but the twilight of bank robbers as folk heroes happened long before the advent of digital money.

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