Marshall Neilan | This Is the Life / 1935

ready for the road

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lamar Trotti and Arthur T. Horman (screenplay from an adaptation by Sid Brod), Marshall Neilan (director) This Is the Life / 1935

 

Marshall Neilan’s 1935 film This Is the Life is mainly a showcase for the young movie star Jane Withers, who was almost the inverse of the pert, cute, and always sweet Shirley Temple, but just as popular in her tomboy, bad girl behavior. And frankly, although Temple could nicely sing and dance, even if Withers’ voice was mostly a child-like version of Ethel Merman, she always hit the right notes and trotted out, in this movie, a Scottish jig, several tap numbers, and the high-legged kicks of a Broadway chorus member.

     The problem, in this case, is that her (Withers performing this time as Geraldine “Jerry” Revier) remarkable talents are being used to make her so-called foster parents, Ed (Gordon Wescott) and Diane (Gloria Roy)—who may not even have procured her through legal methods—rich, while forcing her to dine on spinach and other vegetables and practice her dance routines between her five daily show numbers. Can you blame her, if the poor girl is exhausted and desperate to join the neighborhood ruffians in their street games?

   Fortunately, a handsome hobo, Michael Grant (John McGuire)—really an escapee from a jail, who like most such suspects, has broken out of his cell in order to find the real criminal who has stolen money from his boss—briefly jumps in through her open window when her “aunt” is off dining with her “uncle,” gladly eats the child’s leftovers, and hides in the closet when her “caretakers” return, overhearing their evil plots.

      His intention to hop a train on his way to California seems just perfect for the young unhappy girl who, without him knowing, dresses up in male attire like so many unhappy women in the late 1920s and the 1930s films—Louise Brooks in Beggars of Life (1928), Greta Garbo in Queen Christina (1933), Franciska Gaal in Peter (1934), and Katherine Hepburn in Sylvia Scarlett (1935)—and take to the open road, gladly giving up life as a girl trapped in a far narrower kind of “role-playing.”

      Eluding the police for weeks, despite Revier’s notoriety, the duo, Jerry and Mike, hook up with a charlatan professor, his Walter Brennan-like sidekick, “Sticky” Jones (Francis Ford), and their small cart and several burros.

      In one of the best scenes of the film, they come upon a group of children and their parents celebrating an old-fashioned picnic, where the young boys demand a ride of the burros, and Jerry and Mike get involved with a baseball game, where Jerry hits a homerun, rounds the bases, and is slugged in the nose—all resulting her declaiming that it has been the very best day of her/his life!

      The problem is always the supposedly upright do-gooders, in this case taking the form the female rancher Helen Davis (Sally Blane) who catches the two in their barn trying to steal some milk, recognizes the young Jerry as Geraldine Revier, and calls the state police.

       By the time the police arrive, Mike, the Professor, and the others have explained their situation, but it’s too late, and to protect Jerry, Mike turns himself in to the police as a wanted criminal.

       Even though Jerry is invited to stay on at the Davis farm, where she treated by Helen and her mother as their own child, she despairs over the loss of her father/buddy, and when he writes that he has been convicted, they cook up the idea of creating a tent production at the local fair to raise money for a lawyer who will help plea Mike’s case.

      Of course, it’s really just another way to show off Withers’ musical talents and tie up some loose ends of the plot, as the evil duo of Ed and Diane, still on the look for another young talent to abuse, come across their “Geraldine” and abscond with her, taking her back East and planting her back on the stage.

      Although it’s never explained, Mike has evidently found the right lawyer, been absolved of his crime, and shows up where Jerry is performing, threatening her “foster parents” until they sign a confession, and grabs up his old pal for himself, he and Helen Davis apparently now ready to get married and truly adopt Jerry as their beloved child. As Jerry sums it up: “This is the life.”

      There may not be much here for the LGBTQ audience, but the film does represent yet another example of just how, given the times—despite the lesson learned by the heroine of Ernst Lubitsch’s 1918 comedy I Don’t Want to Be a Man—that in the 1930s, with women forced into the narrow work-world mostly as secretaries and sex workers, it was better to be a man, even if you remained jobless. And without knowing it, this kind of female/male transformation set up young women for the previous all-male jobs they would soon have to undertake—from welders to taxi drivers, from heavy machine operators to sales representatives—with the outbreak of World War II. In the end, the tomboy Withers’ served as a far better example than the doll-figurine of Temple no matter how much pluck she showed. Even in these light comedies, women were now freely represented to be ready for the road.

 

Los Angeles, March 26, 2022 | Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2022).