Frank Tuttle | No Limit / 1931

sex with butterflies

by Douglas Messerli

 

Salisbury Field and Viola Brothers Shore (screenplay, based on a story by George Marion, Jr.), Frank Tuttle (director) No Limit / 1931

 

1931, as film commentator Jeffrey E. Ford notes, was perhaps the nadir year of Clara Bow’s life. Ford summarizes the year:

 “Not even her earliest days as a working actress – an extra girl confined in a succession of cheap studio pictures — could have encompassed the personal humiliation and professional disappointment that Clara had to endure in the last year of her Paramount contract. First, there was the whole Daisy DeVoe mess [Bow’s personal secretary who was accused by Paramount of financial mismanagement) and its highly publicized trial; following hot on the heels of Clara’s disastrous involvement with Texas doctor Earl Pearson and its exposure [Paramount, taking money from her salary had supposedly paid hush money to Pearson’s wife who threatened to make their affair public, but evidently it was never paid]. …Second, there was “The Coast Reporter” and its unprecedented slander campaign against Clara, a campaign so vicious and mean spirited that even the eventual imprisonment of the newspaper’s editor/publisher on obscenity charges could do little to salvage Clara’s shattered reputation. Worst of all, the star’s two films of that year, No Limit and Kick In, were both failures at the box office. For an actress who had been the top female star with the public a short two years before, the collapse was extraordinary. Clara’s subsequent release from her Paramount contract seemed, at the time, almost like an act of mercy. One thing was certain: the 1920’s were over, and the “It Girl” who had received 45,000 fan letters a month was no more. The shining, soulful eyes that had dominated such films as Mantrap (1926), It (1927), and The Wild Party (1929), was considered a Hollywood has-been at the age of twenty-five.”

    

      That any studio would even think to put one of their most popular actors into a disaster of a film such as No Limit which changes its genre, without transition, every few moments, and forces Bow to alternate between an innocent usherette named Bunny O’Day, the owner of a New York private gambling den, and the dedicated moll to a ne’er-do-well gambler, Douglas Thayer (Norman Foster, whose role might as well have been based on Fanny Brice‘s beloved Nicky Arnstein) is almost beyond logic. Although Bow tries her best, and does her best acting in this work as the wide-eyed innocent Bunny, her shift to the dedicated lover of a man who she knows has stolen the jewels of a famous star whom she has just met and tries to pawn off one of rings as a gift to keep her quiet, lies to her continually about his activities, and finally is arrested and imprisoned, is so far beyond believability that the role would stymie even a Garbo or Hepburn.

      You can’t lie to the police to protect a thief at one moment and be the would-be lover to an innocent, wide-eyed hick sailor like Ole Olson (Stuart Erwin) in the next. Actually, the gambling den she is perceived as owning, belongs to Olson, having just inherited it from his uncle along with a Rolls Royce, all that is left of the man’s wealth after paying off his debts.

    What’s even worse, as the commentator to the online Classic Movie Ramblings observes: “the comedy parts of the movie are sadly lacking in laughs while the dramatic sections are equally lacking in drama.”

      The movie has two Pre-Code moments which justify its being in these pages. Told by a lawyer that his uncle was “unique,” Olson responds: “By golly is that why he never got married?” It is far easier for this young fool to imagine that his uncle was a “eunuch” than trying to imagine him as a homosexual.

      The second moment when the unimaginative director Frank Tuttle calls in the pansies comes right after Bunny has stormed out of the gambler’s apartment when he has attempted to rape her—yet another reason why we find her later devotion to him difficult to swallow. Immediately after she leaves, the doorbell rings and he runs to it, imagining that she has returned, only to be greeted a soft-spoken man with slight lisp (Percy Ivins), asking if he might be interested in the postcard collection “Sex among the Butterflies.”

      The script by Salisbury Field and Viola Brothers Shore* was so bad that they couldn’t even come up with a couple of good pansy jokes.

       The final assault on its audiences’ intelligence comes, for those who have suffered through to the end, when it asks them to share her joy for Thayer, having been paroled early for good behavior, the self-declared changed man now, unlike Brice’s Nicky Arnstein, ready to live out his life with Bunny happily ever after.

       After what was to have been her penultimate Paramount picture, Bow had something close to a nervous breakdown, but after she was released from Paramount and broke with her manager B. P. Schulberg, she went on to make at least two more successful pictures, Call Her Savage (1932) and Hoop-La (1933) before retiring from movies permanently.

      

*While both were terribly mediocre writers, Edward Salisbury Field became the secretary, protégé, and possibly lover of Fanny Stevenson after her husband’s Robert Louis Steveson’s death, and upon Fanny’s death married their daughter, Isobel who was 20 years older than he. Viola Brothers Shore and her third husband Haskoll Gleichman were called upon to testify in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

 

Los Angeles, August 19, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2023).