Morals for Women (1931) Online

Cheapo production from Tiffany boasts a solid cast in story about a small-town girl (Bessie Love) who goes to New York City and sleeps her way into a good job and snazzy apartment. Everything is fine until a hometown boy looks her up with ideas of marriage.

She goes back home and tries to reform but gossip about her starts a fight in a club and her brother injures another man in the brawl. To pay for damages, she heads back to the city and her old lifestyle.

Things come to a head when her parents (Emma Dunn, Edmund Breese) pay a surprise visit on a night when she is giving a boozy party. To top things off, her boss (Conway Tearle) brings along the naive boy friend (John Holland).

As always, Bessie Love is warm and natural and very good in an offbeat role (for her). Dunn is solid as the mother. Natalie Moorhead and Lina Basquette are fun as two catty friends, and Virginia Lee Corbin has a small role as a dumb blonde. June Clyde and David Rollins are less successful as the siblings. The film is also known by an alternate title: BIG CITY INTERLUDE.

Wow, only in a pre-code poverty rower would you get such an array of cuties. Sure they may have hit hard movie times but the big studio's loss is our gain - what other film is so jammed packed with names?? Alright so Natalie Moorehead is more of a vixen than sweet young thing (although in the scene where she is trying to stop Helen's small town boyfriend finding out what she is really like, she doesn't seem too upset when she is just too late to stop him!!). They may only have a scene or two to "strut their stuff" but Lina Basquette, Virginia Lee Corbin and June Clyde - Tiffany Studio really lived up to it's name with this production!!

Lina Basquette had a vibrant, larger than life personality. By 1931 she was reduced to supporting parts but she could look back on her life as a Follies beauty and star of Cecil B. DeMille's 1929 special "The Godless Girl". June Clyde was a discovery in the first influx of early musicals, a real cutie and star of "The Cuckoos". That was 1930, 1931 she was struggling along on poverty row. Virginia Lee Corbin was the veteran having appeared in Franklyn kid pix in the 19 teens - in the 20s she became a perfect flapper in the hilarious "Bare Knees". Star of the show was Bessie Love who in 1929 had staged a massive comeback when she starred as feisty "Hank" Mahoney, the little song and dance trouper in "The Broadway Melody". MGM then rewarded her with lack lustre movies like "Chasing Rainbows" and "They Learned About Women", playing the same go-getter types.

Similarly themed to the more prestigious "Possessed" - being about a girl whose home town boyfriend visits her in the big city - but she is now Mr. Van Dine's mistress (he is played by granite jawed Conway Tearle). Paul (John Holland) can't understand her nervousness but his visit brings out her yearning to go home but even in that sleepy town gossip follows her there. Her brother Bud (David Rollins, another former Fox musical player, Clyde plays her sister) gets into a fight with someone who has been making unsavoury remarks about her and $1,000 is needed to keep him out of prison - so Helen gives them the money but has to go back to her seedy lifestyle. Basquette, Moorehead and Corbin play her buddies - wow is Corbin ever tall, she just towers over everyone. Funny I never noticed it in the films I have seen her in.

There is an odd scene where Helen goes to her apartment and finds that she has already been replaced, she rings for a showdown.... The next scene is to do with a big party she is giving - of course her parents decide to pick that night to pay her a surprise visit. Paul is also on his way, as a guest of Van Dine, who brings things out in the open by going to Helen's bedroom draw to retrieve a handkerchief. Another odd scene is when Paul wines and dines Helen at a nightclub - George Olsen's Orchestra is playing (must be a very swanky club), the chorus girls come out in granny dresses and you just know they are going to throw off the "Whistler's Mother" type attire to go into some serious scanty dancing - the scene then changes abruptly - what happened to the chorus cuties??

When all seems lost, loose ends are tied up pretty quickly. Helen returns home to the news that her sister has married and Paul is waiting outside for a fade out clinch!! Love has a couple of emotional scenes and also in the cast (uncredited) is Lillian Rich (a DeMille actress from the 20s) as Helen's confiding friend!!

In 1929, Bessie Love starred in "Broadway Melody". She received an Oscar nomination for this role--yet by 1931, she was starring in trash like "Morals For Women". What happened to her promising career? And, how did she go from a top-notch studio like MGM to a poverty row outfit like Tiffany Pictures (wow...talk about a ridiculously over-hyped name for a studio!).

While the movie never uses words such as prostitute or hooker, this film is about a high-class 'professional girl' (Love) and her decision to visit her home in the country. While her family has no idea she's a prostitute, word gets out--and in order to spare her family the embarrassment, she returns home to 'the big city'. It's too bad, as she longs to quit the racket and marry her old sweetheart. He's willing--but will he be after he learns the truth? And, when her mom and dad drop by for a surprise visit, what will happen next?

Despite many people assuming that sex wasn't invented until the 1960s and the birth of the pill, sex was VERY common in films up until the new Production Code was enacted in mid-1934. So, while films rarely used words like these in the Pre-Code era, the films strongly implied LOTS of immorality. This was because films were unrated and to slip topics like this past families with kids, they often used euphemisms and innuendo to deal with extremely adult subjects.

As for "Morals For Women", it's just a cheap-o trash film--but a bit better written than most. A lot of the acting is pretty bad and the plot is filled with salacious material. But, at the same time, it's very entertaining. My advice is to watch it but even today I wouldn't show it to young kids--mostly because they'll have no idea what's happening. Plus, in this Pre-Code world, sin ISN'T usually punished--as in the end, everything magically works out great--a great lesson for the youth out there (sort of what they learned from the much more recent film "Pretty Woman")! Weird but watchable.

It is one of the peculiar dichotomies of the early sound era that while some pretty racy stuff got into films the plots were at times downright Victorian. Such is the case of Morals For Women which holds aloft the double standard that women have.

Bessie Love trying to spread her wings in talkies stars here as a good time flapper girl who has to save her brother David Rollins when he clunks someone with a bottle in a nightclub brawl. The bottle containing some then illegal booze.

In any event for a $1000.00 Rollins's legal troubles will go away, but to raise the money Love has to turn her pleasures into business.

This is the time of film rest assured will not be remade. I think it was old fashioned even in 1931 despite the current music and fashions of the day on display.

Besides Rollins just needed a good lawyer and his good name would be cleared.

Even the most seemingly worldly of young people can take only so much pressure from life in the big city, and if it's the apple, it can be truly overwhelming. Bessie Love, fresh from triumphs over at MGM after transitioning from silent movies to sound, had a decline in her career at this point, but is excellent as the heroine, a secretary who got too deep into the social scene and thus got a reputation for being a "party girl". Even visiting her hometown causes scandal as the younger crowd who remained behind have gotten wind of her activities. This leads to her younger brother (David Collins) being sent to prison for beating up one of the local boys for harassing him about her.

Younger sister June Clyde longs for a more exciting life herself, but is trapped with her rather naive mother (Emma Dunn) and alcoholic father (Edmund Breese). Realizing that she's bad news for her family, Love quickly returns to New York but a sudden visit from her parents brings everything out into the open when her less than noble boss (Conway Tearle) uses her past against her in order to keep her from the young man (John Holland) whom she really loves and has known since childhood.

This low budget pre-code morality drama shows the wicked ways of the big city and how self-serving behavior and desires of the flesh and the bottle can destroy one's life. Love is surrounded by a rather hard drinking crowd, with rather tough girlfriends in Natalie Moorehead and Lina Basquette who at one point hold a knife to the throat of the annoying dumb blonde next door. Of course, all is forgotten by the time they throw a party in Love's plush apartment (without her permission, of course) where Dunn innocently serves lemonade which to the guest's horror, they find out really is lemonade.

Moorehead and Basquette find their hooch, however, thanks to Love's papa, and they provide quite a few laughs in their efforts to get him to share it with them. Ironically, Basquette had just said how she was sick of parties, sick of the same men, and sick of the same hangovers. This is low budget pre-code drama at its wicked best, not a great movie, but still filled with great lines and amusing, because it shows today's young people that their great grandparents were even wilder, or to quote a line I once heard actress Lois Kibbee tell granddaughter Marcia Cross on "One Life to Live", "My dear, the things we did in my day would curl your hair!".

It was 1931, the Jazz Age had disappeared although it left some cloche hats behind. The Great Depression was nearing its bottom. Yet all was not lost. The "Code" had not yet been imposed, as it would be in a few years -- as if people weren't miserable enough between poverty and prohibition.

Bessie Love, nice without being adorable, gives a pleasant performance as a well-heeled executive secretary who is visited by an eager old flame, John Holland, and spends the evening nightclubbing. Since this is pre-code, you get to see lots of dancing girls in the montage, kicking their bare legs up. As salacious as these actions are, they're nothing compared to the vile pornography that was to descend upon us God-fearing sons of the soil when Busby Berkeley took us on tours of an infinitely long archway of ladies' thighs. The viewer is left feeling as if he'd just been forced through the Nave of Wells, at once depressed and horny.

Well, Holland proposes and is desperate to take Love back to Greenfield. The fly in the ointment is that, in order to become a successful person of commerce (her aides call her "The Queen" behind her back), she's had what we might call an active past and the naive galoot Holland might not be so pleased if he found out.

Love decides to accept the proposal but before doing so, she visits her cheerful working-class family back in Greenfield. She makes a clean break, leaves her position, and takes off with her savings. The family is glad to see her. But shadows loom. Someone in town has been spreading stories about her behavior in New York. Her younger brother, David Rollins, practices plastic surgery on the face of the rumor-monger and puts him in the hospital. To keep her brother out of jail, Love forks over much of her savings -- a thousand dollars, a lot of cash in 1931.

I don't know if Rollins was worth it. I've seen better performances on the stage of Hurden-Looker Grammar School in Hillside, New Jersey. I'd have paid for Rollins' freedom only if he promised to go to acting school. At any rate, it become clear to Love that she and Holland aren't destined to live happily ever after in Greenfield, so she packs up and goes back to her job in New York.

The climactic scene is a party in which everyone we've met so far gets together. The eager lover, not yet having been formally dismissed, shows up, along with Love's Mom and Pop. The host is Love's boss, the butyraceous Conway Tearle, who makes it clear to the boy friend that he, Tearle, has been doing more with Love than simply paying her salary. The scene is played with unusual subtlety. Don't worry. It ends happily, back in Greenfield.

It's basically a romantic drama with some comic elements built into it. All of it is very stagy, as early talkies tended to be. But the overacting is alright if it's splendidly overacted (Bela Lugosi as Dracula). It doesn't happen here. The dialog is functional and clunky, without any tag lines ("I never drink -- vine"). Sometimes the very plot can be sufficient engine for an early talkie's success. ("All Quiet on the Western Front.") The movie audiences of the period probably enjoyed it, if they could afford it. Anything would provide relief from the oppressive economic climate.