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The lady of the lake, the muse as plebeian wisecracker, "always posing." ("How do you spend your nights?" "Re-posing.") Champagne bottles rain down from the penthouse soiree, the camera tracks past confetti and streamers to find the posh reprobate (Lowell Sherman) busy with a paintbrush on a reveler's bare back. His friend (Ralph Graves) is a moneyed scion and a stymied artist, inspiration for his unfinished canvas comes via the put-upon prostitute (Barbara Stanwyck) introduced rowing away from a rowdy yacht. "Pretty good company" for rental, she assures him, plus the right moonstruck look for his painting, except for her makeup. (Lipstick is wiped off and eyelashes are peeled away for a candid close-up, a proper view of Stanwyck's inner rawness.) From atelier to rooftop, where his dreamy description of the stars is met with her sensible worldliness: "Aw, they're too far away," a line that reverberates into Fellini's Amarcord. (Such vertiginous heights are later on contrasted with murky, bottomless waters during a plunge off the ocean liner.) Frank Capra's The Blue Angel, his Waterloo Bridge, a suspended moment of awkward intimacy. The model is seen on a makeshift bed through a rain-speckled window, the painter in his bathrobe paces back and forth in the bedroom, and the montage becomes a wordless swing of anticipation and relief, anxiety and desire. The heroine's late-night tête-à-tête with her spirited roommate (Marie Prevost), her joy remembering a transformative night at the opera, her twitch of hurt when Graves knocks her flowers off the breakfast table—a continuous play of emotional urges, pinpointed by an unguarded actress and an entranced filmmaker. With Nance O'Neil, George Fawcett, and Juliette Compton. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |