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The connection to Letter from an Unknown Woman has been noted, before that there's a dress rehearsal for La Règle du jeu with a spirited cocktail party at a stockbroker's mansion while the bottom drops out of the world on Black Tuesday. (Among the guests are Franklin Pangborn with boytoy in tow, Edna May Oliver on a theatrical tear, and a bespectacled proselytizer excoriating the class divide.) The host (John Boles) puts it as tersely as he can ("You're broke. I'm broke. I don't know anyone who isn't") and retreats to his study, by the pistol lies the epistle he reads over the course of the night. The author is the maiden he once met before heading off to the trenches, the debutante with a borrowed dance card deflowered in the garden, Margaret Sullavan in her screen debut and already lambent with throaty captivation. Their reunion is an acrid chill amid Armistice confetti, "just imagine walking up to a man who doesn't even recognize you and telling him he's the father of your child." The Great War and the Roaring Twenties, Prohibition and the Crash, none as momentous to John M. Stahl as the razor's edge of ardor and wryness in the gaze of his heroine. Her indiscretion is safe with the suffragette aunt (Billie Burke), who nonchalantly takes a younger beau (Reginald Denny) and shrugs off unmarried motherhood as "no longer a tragedy. It isn't even good melodrama." A respectable suitor (George Meeker) can't possibly compete with a new rendezvous between Mr. Haven't We Met Before? and One Who Does Not Forget. "One evening? It was a lifetime for me." The Stahl acerbity in spades at the close, the fatuous homme fatale gets his happy ending, the lady who made sure to distinguish life from romance ("false but pleasant") has since departed. With Benita Hume, Jimmy Butler, Noel Francis, Bramwell Fletcher, Jane Darwell, June Clyde, Oscar Apfel, Onslow Stevens, Robert McWade, Huntley Gordon, Marie Prevost, and Louise Beavers. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |