Rick Burin’s review published on Letterboxd:
*SOME SPOILERS*
In 2003, the British music newspaper, NME, announced that Avril Lavigne’s ‘Sk8er Boi’ was being made into a film. I presume a lot of work has gone into it, as it’s not out yet. But the idea of adapting a hit song is nothing new: here it is happening in 1931, as Rodgers and Hart’s ‘Ten Cents a Dance’ – the story of a dead-on-her-feet, dead-behind-the-eyes taxi dancer who loathes her johns – becomes a grabby melodrama in which the stolid ethics that prefaced and followed the Pre-Code period are often as liquid as lava. (Incidentally, the song was popularised by Ruth Etting, who got a biopic starring Doris Day in 1955, Love Me or Leave Me.)
The set-up is pure D. W. Griffith: a morality play (a la Way Down East) with Barbara Stanwyck in the Gish role. Her character, the dancer for hire, is good-hearted but faintly brutalised, doing dirty work to help further the career of a nervy, bookish young man (Monroe Owsley), who lives in her apartment block. But what’s this? Moustache and slicked-back hair? Check. Well-cut modern clothes? Check. A fat wad of cash to chuck at the impressionable young waif? Check. Ricardo Cortez’s dapper man-about-town is every inch the silent-era villain.
A few minutes later, and Griffith’s Victorian morality – which would be largely reinstated, with better hats, from 1934 – has been chucked on its ear. Owsley is a throbbingly neurotic, abusive husband, Cortez a wise, sad-eyed benefactor, and the young Stanwyck negotiating the complexities of a strong early part, learning to act on screen before our very eyes.
In simplest terms, there are three great types of Stanwyck character: the harsh, hard-bitten Pre-Code toughies she played in pictures like When Ladies Meet; the sentimental ones that cut straight to the core of me (Ball of Fire and Remember the Night) and the later characterisations where she seemed to lose touch with her background and the emotions that had once sat just beneath the surface, growling her way through synthetic ‘strong woman’ roles, with only the occasional recourse to dazzling brilliance.
Here, as in Illicit – released three weeks earlier – you can see embryonic versions of all those types, along with a realism that she would arguably trade away for a deceptively direct emotional effectiveness, and which is tempered only slightly here by moments of woodenness (after all, Stanwyck had only got her first proper stage role in 1927, and her first leading movie part in 1929). The scene in which she monologues to Cortez about the man she meets in the dance hall – and it is only one man, they all merge into one man – is played with the most mournful face, beneath a hood that evokes a nun’s habit, the dialogue in almost a monotone. In it, she flirts with that curious intonation that afflicted a lot of actors in early talkies, having to tailor their talents to primitive sound equipment, but the look on her face does all the work, and it won’t leave you in a hurry.
Elsewhere, we catch a glimpse of the hard-boiled Stanwyck, the one who would reform for love, but not before aiding a bank robbery or taking over a woman’s prison. She quits the dancehall for the first time having slapped a bouncer – a neat scene that rejects nascent cliché, whether sentimental or comedic – but later returns in need of cash. “I hate this place,” she says, glowering, her teeth coming out to play. The treatment of the dancehall is interestingly conflicted: despite her tiresome boss, it’s the place from which Stanwyck draws most of her strength – here she is somebody, has worth, earns her own money, is part of a largely supportive community of women. She hates the men she meets there, but is treated better than in her own home, where she acts like a saint.
That portrait of sick love – being besotted with someone who’s bad for you – usually involves a macho badboy rather than Owsley’s fantastically dislikeable Eddie Miller, a callow streak of nervous energy who uses his weakness as a weapon. Though Owsley (Ned in the original screen version of Holiday) can be a little one-note, it’s a note that rings true, saying something disquieting about male manipulation. Perhaps the writers pile on the wrongdoing too heavily – he’s not just an adulterer but a spendthrift, a gambler and an embezzler – but many of the other observations remain modern: Eddie is a man driven half-mad by the idea that someone else might desire his wife, as if she’s merely property and not a person in her own right. Old films are sometimes lampooned by people (let’s call them what they are, ‘twats’) because the camera moves too slowly, but the action moves too quickly – characters meet once, chat briefly, have fallen in love forever. But here Owsley’s graduation from shy. solicitous, educated young man to all-time villain has echoes of Dewey Cox’s first marriage in Walk Hard, but is probably convincing: people do disillusion us that quickly, and sometimes we may miss the seeds of that behaviour, and may continue to miss them, blinded by love.
The other central performance is interesting too. I am simply never going to stop finding it funny that a New York Jew called Jacob Kranze changed his name to ‘Ricardo Cortez’ to cash in on the Rudolph Valentino craze, and then sound came in and he was transparently a New York Jew still called Ricardo Cortez. This was the year in which he starred as Sam Spade in the first version of The Maltese Falcon, and he’s fine in both films: this isn’t a flawless performance, but he has the right mixture of solicitude and sleaze, which keeps us guessing without undermining the basic coherence of the character, and the key scene in which Stanwyck comes to him to plead for money is, while a little repetitive and confusingly-written, also a powerhouse sequence, with proper, grown-up characters negotiating a Hollywoodised dilemma. This was Lionel Barrymore’s final film as a director – for the last 23 years of his life, he would be one of the screen’s most beloved and respected character actors – and it feels that you can see his hand in these performances, and the dynamics between them.
The other great directorial flourish is in the use of sound, which is more experimental than in most early talkies: in the dancehall sequences, it’s ramped up uncomfortably high, to echo Stanwyck’s unease at her oppressive environment, and it’s also well-used in the passage where she visits Cortez at his office, and you feel the pressure of time, and the sacrifice that he makes so easily by dropping everything to see her.
This movie doesn’t have much of a reputation, and it has its share of woodenness and hack melodrama, but it’s fascinating in how much it plays with Hollywood norms, both in terms of morality and audience satisfaction, right up to that great scene in which Stanwyck goes to a check-in stand, hands over ten cents, picks up the dress that Cortez once gave her… and promptly goes back to work as a taxi dancer.
All in all, it’s rather more complex than the lyrics of ‘Ten Cents a Dance’, and makes you wonder whether Sk8r Boi: The Movie would have gone on to deconstruct the idea of baggy clothes as a rejection of contemporary gender norms.