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Director William Wellman was born on this day, February 29, in 1896. That would make today his 120th birthday, or his 30th, depending on your feelings regarding leap year. Nicknamed Wild Bill because of his adventurous days as a pilot for the Lafayette Flying Corps during WWI, Wellman led one of those audacious lives that makes for good storytellers. Wellman’s medium of choice for telling stories was the Hollywood film. Movie fans can celebrate Wild Bill’s birthday this week on TCM by watching three of his best-known films: Battleground (March 1, 10:00am, EST), Wild Boys of the Road (March 3, 5:00am, EST), and The Public Enemy (March 3, 8:30am, EST).
Though infamous for browbeating his actors and intimidating his actresses, Wellman is justly famous for his male-dominated action movies (The Public Enemy), adventures about men in adversity (Wings), or stories about the interaction of men within a group (The Ox-Bow Incident, The Story of G.I. Joe, Battleground). However, I prefer Wellman’s early melodramas featuring female protagonists who are down on their luck, down and out, or just down on love. Usually, these melodramas are not discussed as part of Wellman’s body of work; they are most often considered and assessed as pre-Code films.
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WELLMAN AND DOROTHY COONAN ON THE SET OF ‘WILD BOYS OF THE ROAD.’ WELLMAN AND COONAN WERE WED IN 1934.
During the pre-Code era, Wellman directed for Warner Bros., which specialized in topical subjects that might “be a headline on the front page of any successful metropolitan daily,” as Darryl Zanuck once explained. During the Depression, WB’s films crammed violent crime, sex, illegal alcohol, drugs, adultery, prostitution, white slavery, and other unsavory topics into fast-paced, gritty street dramas. Wellman was one of the studio’s fastest-working directors, and he reveled in material that was tough and violent, so he cranked out more than his share of pre-Code gems.
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I AM INTRIGUED BY DOROTHY MACKAILL OF ‘SAFE IN HELL.’
My three favorites are Safe in Hell (1931), Frisco Jenny (1933), and The Purchase Price (1932). In Safe in Hell, Dorothy Mackaill stars as Gilda, a New Orleans prostitute who thinks she murdered her ex-lover. She escapes to a Caribbean island, where she falls in love with a sailor. When he sets sail, he leaves her behind as the only female resident in their tropical hotel. The male residents leer, ogle, and stare as she fends off their advances. The dialogue drips with double entendre. When Gilda fetches water from the community cistern, she is appalled that the water has worms in it. The corrupt sheriff tells her that the worms are necessary to consume the bacteria that can cause sickness, but he begins the conversation by asking her if she is offended by “slimy wigglers.” Gilda lives in a world of moral anarchy, and it no surprise that she is morally compromised. Yet, we are sympathetic to her plight.
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GEORGE BRENT AND BARBARA STANWYCK IN AN INTIMATE MOMENT IN ‘THE PURCHASE PRICE.’
There is a pre-Code subgenre in which the female protagonist loses her virginity to an immature, cowardly, irresponsible, or cruel man and then ends up pregnant and alone. In order to survive, and to do what is best for her child, she gives up her bundle of joy. As fate—and melodrama—would have it, the mother crosses paths with her child when he/she matures into adulthood. Ruth Chatterton stars as the title character in Frisco Jenny, who has a child out of wedlock and opens a brothel to support him. A brothel is no place for a child, so she gives him up for adoption. Years later, Jenny discovers her son is a crusading lawyer determined to clean up San Francisco from establishments like hers. This type of storyline reveals a wide range of bad male behavior—lying beaus, irresponsible sweet-talkers, wealthy playboys who seduce working class girls, and cowards who can’t stand up to their families to marry the girl they love. As with Gilda in Safe in Hell, audiences sympathize with Jenny, and her choices are presented as understandable. Aside from the pre-Code content, Frisco Jenny is a must-see because of Chatterton, a stage actress with a brusque elegance who played determined, assertive women.
In The Purchase Price (airing on TCM March 15, 8am, EST), quintessential pre-Code star Barbara Stanwyck plays Joan Gordon, a singer with a checkered past. To escape her gangster boyfriend, she travels to Montreal, where she changes places with a hotel maid who is about to become the mail-order bride of a frontier farmer. Joan and the farmer get off to a rocky start when she rejects his clumsy attempts on their wedding night. As the two get to know each other, they fall in love, but they keep their distance for fear of disappointment. It is the struggle to save the farm that unites them via his hard work and her sacrifice.
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IN ‘NIGHT NURSE’ STARS STANWYCK AND JOAN BLONDELL SPEND A LOT OF TIME UNDRESSING.
Wellman admired the actresses who brought energy and charisma to the leading roles in these three films. Early in her career, Mackaill had struggled to transform herself from chorus girl to movie actress. She brought that same determination to Safe in Hell, because she wanted to transition from silent films to talkies. Wellman respected her hard work. He admired Stanwyck because she was tough, strong, straightforward, and professional. She also displayed some of Wellman’s daring and nerve. During the wheat-burning sequence in The Purchase Price, she did not like the way her stand-in was handling the scene, because it wasn’t good enough. She stepped in and did the stunts herself, burning her legs in the process. Wellman did not think he was going to like Ruth Chatterton when he was assigned to Frisco Jenny. Already a star, the high-strung Chatterton had a reputation for being difficult with directors. During preproduction, the two did not interact. On the first day of shooting, she arrived on set on time and nailed a difficult scene in one take. Wellman praised her, Chatterton was appreciative, and the two became fast friends.
Wellman also directed other pre-Code movies featuring hardened female characters as protagonists. Night Nurse stars Stanwyck as a dedicated nurse who saves two children from a plot to starve them to death for their inheritance. Though interesting because of the gruesome plot, Night Nurse seems lackluster in comparison to his other work from this period.
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WELLMAN DIRECTS LORETTA YOUNG AND FRANCHOT TONE IN ‘MIDNIGHT MARY.’
I have not seen Midnight Mary, which became one of Wellman’s favorites, but it sounds terrific. Loretta Young stars in the title role as a woman who has lived on the fringes of society since childhood. Struggling in poverty, she uses her beauty to survive the Depression. The male characters are presented from Young’s perspective—whether gutter gangster or wealthy playboy, they all want one thing from her. She shoots the gangster before he can kill his romantic rival, the playboy. She knows her game is up because, as she quips about her jury, “You don’t think those twelve good men are going to give me a break, do you?” Cynical, sensational, and fast-paced: That seemed to be the essence of Wellman’s style during the pre-Code era.
Wellman liked making tough films about shadowy characters who populate the underbelly of society. But, according to Wild Bill Wellman: Hollywood Rebel, which was penned by the director’s son, he grew weary of what he called the fallen woman genre. He complained to the studio about the repetitive nature of some of the plots. But, by June of 1934, when the Production Code became mandatory for all Hollywood movies, his complaints didn’t matter. The Code curtailed the kind of content and characters that made Wellman’s fallen woman stories so compelling.