|
The title refers to a woman's risk ("Don't I know it!"), and takes literal form during the finale. The Roaring Twenties are a country club bash brimming with casual duplicity and faddish divertissements, the gals line up for the "aero wheel race" and the camera goes inside the loops to photograph the spinning figures. The party girl (Kay Johnson) needs her inheritance to pay off her lover's (Conrad Nagel) divorce settlement but the will specifies she be married first, the lug on Death Row (Charles Bickford) would make a perfect temporary husband. "There's nothing immoral about marriage." "That's a wisecrack and he doesn't even know it." Wedding day behind bars showcases Cecil B. DeMille's dexterity with aural layering in the dawn of talkies: Marital vows half-swallowed by sobbing, the off-screen hammering of the gallows, Russ Columbo's melancholy crooning in a nearby cell. The real culprit confesses minutes before the execution so the proletarian bear turns up at the would-be widow's mansion just as a noisy soiree is gearing up. (Wandering into the Art Deco bathroom, he takes a bite out of the bath salts in a true Boudu moment.) Class relations like parallel worlds forcibly braided, the burly laborer has a metaphor for it, rough stones right out of the mine versus affected diamonds. "Coal? What's love got to do with coal?" Voluble, densely packed, a superabundant outlook (vide Johnson in heels in the small-town kitchen, cf. Woman of the Year). Everything is sorted out at the bottom of the pit by way of explosive illumination, with consequences for Pabst's Kameradschaft and DeMille's own later apocalypses. "Sounds like we're going to Hell!" With Julia Faye, Joel McCrea, Muriel McCormac, and Douglas Scott. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |