Clarence Brown | Sadie McKee / 1934

giving her all and taking what she can get

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Meehan (screenplay, based on a work by Viña Delmar), Clarence Brown (director) Sadie McKee / 1934

 

Poor Sadie McKee (Joan Crawford), the mother of the wealthy Alderson family’s maid. The son Jack (Franchot Tone), now a lawyer, returns home, glad to see his childhood playmate Sadie. And for few moments they reminisce in a way that almost suggests he might be interested in her as a future beau. But when he sits down at the table with his family, he quickly reveals his intolerance of a young local boy who worked for the Alderson family where he got into some kind trouble, evidently not of his own making. Young Jack is convinced such people are always criminal and shouldn’t be given a second chance, while his father is contemplating doing just that. Speaking out at the dinner table, Jack’s opinions infuriate Sadie enough that, helping out as a server, she cannot resist finally speaking her piece, particularly since the topic of their discussion, Tommy Wallace (Gene Raymond), is the boy she loves.

     Now disgraced in the Alderson household, and with Tommy without a job, she determines to join him, at the last moment, on a train to New York to begin their lives over, free from the old prejudices of the small town in which they grew up.

      The couple, nearly broke before they have even begun, meet up with a hard-talking chorus girl, Opal (Jean Dixon) in an automat. She quickly befriends them, suggesting her boarding house might have a room, despite its being a dump. They’re happy with the rent, whittled down by the kind landlord to $6.00 a week, but confused about what to do about the single bed. By 1934 it was again dangerous to suggest that they might abandon propriety for the night, even if they planned to marry in the morning. Tommy volunteers to sleep sitting up in the chair, but these young lovers just can’t resist a goodnight kiss, which we all know leads to…what director Clarence Brown’s camera doesn’t hang around to give evidence of.

      Sadie’s off early the morning to find a job, reminding Tommy that they have a wedding date at city hall at noon, and inviting Opal to be her bridesmaid. But before she can even get turned down from a job or two, Tommy has connected up with the household seductress, Dolly Merrick (Esther Ralston) who convinces him that his banjo playing and singing is good enough to go on tour with her.

      At the marriage bureau Sadie and Opal sit out a more than a dozen quick marriages while waiting for her no-show lover. At about ten of four, with Opal asleep and Sadie with her arm resting on the bench around her, a cop approaches asking: “You two girls wanna get married?” a question that could have been asked in the general or the specific, the latter of which, oddly enough is almost want happens at the end of Sadie’s saga, when Opal and she move in to keep a house together with Sadie’s mother.

      Returning to her room Sadie realizes Tommy’s clothes are gone and she’s left high and dry alone without a cent in one of the most unforgiving cities in the nation. Opal takes her with her to her chorus-line job, the two raking men through the coals on the bus trip there, but at the same time Opal admitting they have what women want and every gal has her price, a clear foretelling of what happens next.

      Listening in, all ears, is a sour-faced woman who with her black bow-tie and hat pulled down over her ears looks something very close (she hasn’t a Pince-nez and we can’t tell whether or not she’s dressed in a suit) to the stock figure of the pre-Code lesbian.

      Sadie is now dancing in a cheap bar, however, a wonderful trio of Gene Austin on piano, Candy Candido on bass, and Otto Heimel, better known as Coco, on guitar who play some wonderful jazz. Good thing, because the night’s guest is the multi-millionaire Jack Brennan (Edward Arnold) with his lawyer, who spots Sadie in the chorus and calls for her to come out and join him. It so happens that his lawyer is none another than Mike Alderson, who Sadie has not yet forgiven for his comments on Tommy. And just to spite him, as he keeps reminding his client that it’s late and the girl he’s chosen to join him in champagne is probably a gold-digger, she hangs on to the loveable drunk far longer than any such scene should last, eventually even tagging along at his insistence to his mansion.

      Almost before she knows it, and despite Alderson’s endless pleas that she leave the gentle, good-natured drunken rich man alone, she finds herself married, coifed in the finest clothes, and ensconced in a house which even she hasn’t fully yet toured.

      Showing Opal around the place, she knows she’s hit the jackpot, but she likes the guy who asks so little of her and gives her and her friend anything she wants. Her only punishment is having to spend many a night out drinking with him, undressing him, and along with his faithful butler Finnegan Phelps (Leo G. Carroll in one of his first roles) getting him into bed, and when he’s fully drunk, taking a punch on the jaw.

      The war continues between Sadie and Alderson, who can’t believe she could care for Brennan and is even more distressed when the doctor announces that if he continues to drink as he has, he’ll be dead in a few months. Firing the doctors, who haven’t helped him in the past, and dismissing even Finnegan after she discovers that he has slipped a bottle of bourbon under the dying man’s pillow, Sadie is perceived by the both the staff and Alderson as planning to help him to die so that she might inherit his millions. Alderson is particularly convinced of the fact given that Sadie has kept up with Tommy’s vaudeville career and even visited one of his performances in a distant city.

      She finally convinces the household cook, maids, and even the butler that she is determined to help her husband kick his habit, and when she achieves it, even Alderson has to change his mind about the woman who has shown him up for being so cynical about human behavior. 

       Despite the tough talking, hard-headed woman she has since become, Sadie remains, if nothing else, honest, finally admitting to the cured and sober Brennan that she still loves Tommy and has just discovered that Dolly has dropped him in the act because he has grown sick with what soon discovers is tuberculosis.

       Brennan, still the kind and loving fool, quickly grants her a divorce. When she finally tracks Tommy down in a hospital where he lays dying, what she doesn’t know is that Alderson has long been paying for Tommy’s care and helped him get into the hospital hoping he might be cured. He dies in her arms, forcing Crawford to take on yet fourth or fifth persona, the hard-working woman living in peace with Opal and her mother in what looks to me very much like an unofficial version of the marriage the cop asked them about in that early scene.

 

                          Mike: You three girls are pretty snug here.

                          Sadie: Yes, we have a lot of fun.

        Surely, just to keep the censors off their backs in the years which Joseph Breen and his Production Code hacks came down hard on all of Hollywood cinema, we discover that Alderson has been a regular visitor to their dinner table, and the film ends with his successfully blowing out his birthday candles wishing what we can only imagine is that he finally join her comfy household. After what she’s been through, I can only wish him good luck. He might remain a regular visitor but like so many of Crawford’s best roles, she’s now devoted to her career, and perhaps to Opal’s wonderfully tough-witted wisecracks. And frankly I don’t believe that for Sadie the mild-mannered Franchot Tone has any longer got what it takes to make her happy.

 

Los Angeles, March 31, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2023).