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"Well, Lilly, battling for your virtue again?" She (Ruth Chatterton) enters as a hopeful bride, the event's flowery sentiments have been pruned by servants in the kitchen. ("I Love You Truly" is heard, "I had a voice like that once." "Yeah, once is enough.") The husband (Gordon Westcott) works the carnival circuit, the wife levitates grudgingly in his magic act, he's unmasked as an absconding bigamist. Perpetually in need of booze to lubricate his scratchy larynx, the barker (Frank McHugh) is there for her—they get hitched just in time for her miscarriage, the marriage is unconsummated but maintained on the road. Next stop is the health elixir hawked by the orotund quack (Guy Kibbee), cf. Beckett's Bando (Watt), the heroine recites its qualities through a mouthful of gum. A bout of insanity cuts "The Beast of Berlin" (Robert Barrat) down to size, the cabbie with engineering aspirations who replaces him (George Brent) tickles the lady's fancy. "What you need is love." "They still use that word?" Saltimbanques and charlatans and lunatics, everybody just "trying to chisel some happiness," quite the Balzacian canvas from William Wellman. Hoochie-coochie dancer, sawdust-and-tinsel angel winking from the footlights, always the Chatterton elegance amid the seediness. (The rare joy of a day in the country promptly crumbles under the weight of a former john's recognition at a greasy spoon.) Rainy documentary views of a truck nearly tipping over as the couple smooch at the steering wheel, horror lighting as the asylum inmate bends the bars on his cell window. The tragic closing glance is from the back of a speeding ambulance, for "the gypsy in me." With Ruth Donnelly, Marjorie Gateson, Arthur Vinton, Grant Mitchell, Margaret Seddon, and Mae Busch. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |