Laurence Schwab and Lloyd Corrigan | Follow Thru / 1930

wanting to be bad

by Douglas Messerli

 

Laurence Schwab and Lloyd Corrigan (screenwriters, based on the Broadway musical by Lew Brown, B. G. DeSylva, Ray Henderson, and Laurence Schwab, and directors) Follow Thru / 1930

 

This two-color process film of 1930, the second to be released by Paramount that year, was long thought to be lost, but was recovered in the 1990s and preserved by the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Although DVD copies exist, they do not properly reveal the two-color process. As the writer for The Nitrate Diva describes the proper colors:

 

“Unlike the full spectrum of three-color Technicolor, the two-color process denies us the soothing true blues, cheerful yellows, and sumptuous purples that we see in reality. Instead, early Technicolor plunges the viewer into a festive, askew universe reminiscent of peppermint candy and just as invigorating. Its charm lies in its unreal-ness.”

 

    Moreover, this is perhaps the only major musical that I know of devoted to Women’s golf, most of the film taking place at the Los Angeles Bel Air Country Club and in Palm Springs. The film’s central figure, Lora Moore (Nancy Carroll), having grown up with a father devoted to golf, is the best golfer and most popular girl at her country club, about to face off with state woman’s champion, Mrs. Van Horn (Thelma Todd).

     As the same reviewer describes our first view of Lora in color:

 

“The film introduces its star, Nancy Carroll, five minutes into the runtime with a close-up so delicious that I’d swear it had calories. After taking a careful swing with her golf club, Carroll peers intently into the distance. Just as we’ve adjusted to the rapturous splendor of what we’re seeing, Carroll’s face blossoms into a smile and stuns us anew.”

     Quickly paired off with golf teacher Jerry Downes (the memorable lead of William A. Wellman’s Wings, Charles “Buddy” Rogers), the two become almost a billboard for the all-American couple, despite the constant attempts by the bitchy Van Horn to woo Jerry away from Lora for her own quite obviously sexual intentions. Lora may lose the golf game to Van Horn, but in the end she easily wins the man who puts her putt in the proper hole. And yes, despite the dewy freshness of its stars, the film itself is fully of its time, a pre-code medley of sexual innuendos that never apologizes for its attempts, as Angie Howard (Zelma O’Neal) zestfully sings out in Ray Henderson, B. G. DeSylva, and Lew Brown’s “I Want to Be Bad”:

 

              If it's naughty to rouge your lips

              Shake your shoulders and shake your hips

              Let a lady confess, I want to be bad!

 

              If it's naughty to vamp the men

              Sleep each morning till after ten

              Then the answer is yes, I want to be bad!

 

              ………..

 

              When you're learning what lips are for

              And it's naughty to ask for more

              Let a lady confess, I want to be bad!

    Indeed, a great deal of the film’s (and original musical’s) naughtiness arises from characters and situations that have no logical purpose in the work except for their odd behaviors. Pro-golfer Jerry Downes has been hired to teach Jack Martin (Jack Haley) who is absolutely terrified by women, partly, it appears because how his body suddenly shakes and shudders around them and equally, we suspect—at least until the requisite ending when he is heterosexually snagged by the bad girl herself, Angie—he simply prefers the company of men like Jerry, who is so handsome in this film that he puts nearly all the women to shame. Put simply, he doesn’t like women until he suddenly does.

     But he’s funnier by far as a woman-hating mess of a human being whose major encounter with a woman in the past has been at a masquerade party where he has been stripped him of his father’s ring, a keepsake that if lost will certainly result in his wealthy father cutting off his hefty allowance. It turns out, as it does in all such musicals structured upon a hundred incidents of coincidence, that Angie was the girl who stole his ring.

     Because of his fear of women, Jack wants immediately to take off with Jerry to Palm Springs, but since Lora wants to keep her hands on him just little longer, she plots with Angie, who in turn plots with J. C. Effingham (Eugene Pallette), manufacturer of ladies’ girdles, who just happens to be visiting the club as well, and who spots Jack Martin as the son of the owner of one of the biggest chains of dry goods who has so far refused to buy Effingham’s girdles. Unpredictably they team up, a woman and the Girdle King to hold down a man terrified of all things feminine.

     In the meanwhile, of course, Lora meets Jerry, the two falling in love as they sing George Marion, Jr. and Richard A. Whiting’s “A Peach of a Pair,” whose title pretty much summarizes the song’s sentiments, while Angie and Jack get to know one another better through pinches and jabs to “Button Up Your Overcoat,” Brown, DeSylva, and Henderson’s hit song.

     Since Van Horn’s also hot to keep Jerry near her, where just below the border she’s bought a house to which she’s invited everyone to attend another masquerade party, she pretends to be after Jack as well, hoping to convince him to stay on with Jerry in his lap. Her approach, much more direct, involves seducing him until he trembles, and inviting him to her home in Pebble Beach for a week of sex:

 

                                Van Horn: So, you will come?

                                Martin: It won’t be long soon.

                                Van Horn: You and Jerry?

                                Martin: Why Jerry?

                                Van Horn: Well you see, he practically asked me

                                                   to invite him.

                                Martin: Well, I suppose we have him come

                                             along too.

 

This scene which hints at everything from ejaculation to a possible threesome would be forbidden only four years later with Joseph Breen as the head of the Hays Code Board.

     Of course, Martin must still get his ring back from Angie—his father has telegrammed him that he will disown if he doesn’t return with the ring—and with Effingham to help him, the two break into the women’s shower as the girls dress before a rematch between Lora and Van Horn—this a metaphorical game for who will control Jerry’s heart. Dressed as plumbers, the duo dive deeply into the girl’s darkest domain, successfully getting Martin’s ring back, but using the occasion, when the women threaten to return, to hide out in the women’s lockers. Without logical explanation, apparently just for the entertaining nonsense of it, both grab women, pulling them into the lockers with them, as the males exit the small cubicles dressed in drag. The site of heavy-set Eugene Pallete in a striped women’s frock can’t be matched even by Jack Haley’s summer shirtwaist.

      If you’ve ever watched a musical from the 1930s, you know that there has to be a terrible mix up, the lovers each believing, despite all evidence to the contrary, that their loved ones are interested in someone or something else; in this case Lora becomes convinced that Jerry is after Van Horn, and Jerry, with the help of the bitchy widow, believes Lora loves him only as a free golf lesson or two. Yet with Jerry’s somewhat resistant help, Lora wins the second match and her man, with a little push by the other couple about to head to the alter, Jack Martin and Angie, who just “got to one another” despite it all. As Angie and her man drive off, they proffer a bit of golf advice to the now hugging lovers, “Follow through,” without referring, this time, to their balls and mashies.

 

Los Angeles, September 15, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2022).