John Francis Dillon | Millie / 1931

independence is hard to hold on to

by Douglas Messerli

 

Charles Kenyon and Ralph Morgan (screenplay, based on the novel by Donald Henderson Clarke), John Francis Dillon (director) Millie / 1931

 

John Francis Dillon’s 1931 film Mille portrays a world in which men are definitely no good, and if nothing else cannot be trusted. Millie (Helen Twelvetrees), we are told from the very scenes of the film, is a strong-minded beauty who everyone loves, particularly those of the male gender, but not because she’s easy—quite the opposite, any loose hands are removed quite emphatically from the geography of her body. But she’s still an innocent when it comes to romance, and marries a local rich boy, Jack Maitland (James Hall) simply because he happens to ask her when they’re out on a drive. Trapped in a hotel room a few hours later, having stopped by for a visit to the justice of the peace, Millie realizes that she is still a young girl now suddenly unprepared for sex.

     A few years later, doting on a lovely 3-year-old daughter whom the governess snatches from her after only a short while with the mother, Millie is ensconced in a beautiful home with a husband who, often away on business, also seems to have forgotten the joy of their youthful love.

     For those sentimental hearts who haven’t figured yet it out, Millie is now buried in the role of a housewife without any household chores and parenting responsibilities and without the husband who her installed her in the house. She is bored and restless.

     The director and writers of this sophisticated picture don’t even bother to explain how different her life is now from the others when it puts on full display two obviously lesbian women in bed together, their landlord standing nearby demanding the monthly rent. One of them, Angie Wickerstaff (Joan Blondell) went to school with Millie and her other, more dominant of them, Helen Riley (Lilyan Tashman) has clearly put Angie up to calling her with the hopes of borrowing the rent money. Millie, delighted with the call, agrees to meet them that afternoon at a cabaret.

      As these two make immediately clear, men are good for one thing only: money and the good times they provide. Men are useless when it comes to a serious sexual relationship. And that’s were friends come in.

      Millie is intrigued just for the variety of having a day out, but before she can even swallow down a drink she spots her husband, who has just left on another business trip, dancing with a blonde, his lips upon her cheek. Within minutes, Millie has confronted the couple, given her hubby’s girlfriend a good slug, and begun divorce proceedings that will leave her, for the sake of the good home and better opportunities, without her daughter Connie (Anita Louise) and will put her behind a hotel cigar stand where once more all the men gather with the hopes of a date.

      As her now dear friends, Angie and Helen, argue, however, Millie—who prefers the lowly paid reporter Tommy Rock (Robert Ames) over the wealthy playboy banker Jimmy Damier (John Halliday) or the theater producer who begs her to perform in one of his musicals because at least Tommy “keeps his hands to himself”—has a very strange notion about men. When she first announces that since she is now divorced, she will go looking for work, Helen howls out: "Work?!? You won't have any time for opportunity!" Angie proclaims: “When I’m through with a man I’m just beginning.”

     Between Millie’s tough control of the men who try to get her into bed and the two lesbians’ endless flirtation with anyone who keeps a wallet in his pocket, Dillon’s movie is a great joy to watch, as actor Twelvetrees begins to take her character into previously uncharted feminist territory, even moving in with the regular guy Tommy, who takes her to Coney Island instead of a fancy restaurant, while refusing to marry him on account of “I’ve already tried that.”

      Soon her good work even pays off as she gets promoted to head of all hotel special operations and through her connections with Jimmy Damier even gets Tommy a special job in his bank. And if in all their heterosexual gold-digging antics have confused some of the movie’s audience, Helen makes it quite clear that she won’t allow Angie realize her attempts to squeeze a proposal out of a wealthy businessman too far, offering herself up to a bruising dance with him in order to cut off her lover’s drunken sentimentalism.

      Much of this takes place during a grand celebration Millie has arranged in the hotel dining room, where Damier has even arranged for a song to be sung especially composed about Millie’s lovely red hair. But then something happens to this movie.

      In terms of the plot, it’s simply that Millie overhears from a woman while in the bathroom that her beloved Tommy hasn’t yet made it to the grand affair Millie is throwing because he’s upstairs with another woman. The woman in the bathroom declares she’ll prove it by having Tommy bring down her purse which she left in that same room. When Millie returns of her party, she watches behind her to observe Tommy’s entrance, which sure enough involves a quick stop at the gossip’s table. But then, we knew—as she and her friends maintained early in the movie—men are not to be trusted. So Millie gets drunk, sends Tommy packing and breaks, along with Damier, into the place they cohabited to tear down the drapes she’s specially sewn and break a few of the pictures of herself scattered about the place.

       So now Millie herself becomes a good time girl. But with her sad eyes, her intensely deep beauty, Twelvetree’s pretense of self-destructive loneliness is difficult to believe. Her Millie is a self-made woman of great beauty who has been suddenly thrown a new script from which she, alas, will never recover, as the movie slips slowly into a lachrymose revenge drama. Even Angie leaves one of her parties with the obscene businessman that evidently she has married despite Helen’s attempts to prevent it. As Millie and Helen drink out the end of that long party by themselves, Millie dares to suggest that it’s not the same for Helen as it is for her since Helen has never been in love. Even the script seems to have forgotten her and Angie’s former relationship or suddenly has determined that such alliances do not really involve love.

      Throughout the late 1920s the general manager of the Radio Corporation of America David Sarnoff, with backing from financier Joseph P. Kennedy began buying up theaters in which to show their new Photophone talking movies. Making arrangements, with great controversy, with Pathé and the vaudeville Keith-Albee-Orpheum circuit run by Edward Albee the company obtained a large chain of new theaters in which to show its products. And buoyed by the success of its new Technicolor production Rio Rita (1929), it increased the number of newly announced films from 12 features to 29 at the same time making a deal to purchase the small Pathé Studios outright. The deal, secured on January 29, 1931 included the studio, its contract players, it well-regarded newsreel operation, and Cecile DeMille’s old Culver City studio and backlot, becoming the new RKO Pathé Pictures Inc. This, despite the reeling US economy and Kennedy’s masking of Pathé’s considerable financial debt.

       Shooting for Millie began in October 1930, announced as a Universal Production, but because of producer Charles R. Rogers’ previous agreement to have his films distributed by RKO and the fact that Twelvetrees had been under contract to Pathé, the film was released in February 8, 1931 as one of the first of the new RKO productions.

       I have no evidence that anything in the script changed after the RKO takeover or that RKO or even the censors made alterations in the original script, but if nothing else at this point in the film the tone of the movie changes. All the air—and obvious fun—of the previous 46 minutes of this work has gone out of it. The independent, free-thinking woman now finds herself pleading with Jimmy Damier—who she’s heard is now working with her former husband Maitland and regularly visiting the house where he has taken an interest in her now 16-year-old daughter Connie—to stay away from her daughter.

       He agrees, but within a short period of time, while pretending to drive the girl off to college, waylays her in his nearby lodge with the intent of seducing her. His chauffeur realizing what he has in mind, makes a telephone call to Millie, who hops in a Manhattan cab and speeds off the country lodge to shoot her old friend dead just in time to save the unsuspecting child from Damier’s next move after his sudden kiss.

      In the murder trial, Millie refuses to explain the circumstances in order to keep her daughter’s name out of the news, but in so doing allows the prosecution to suggest that she shot her old friend out of jealously for another woman who ran off, Millie refusing to reveal who she was. The situation is dire until Millie’s three old journalist friends, Tommy Rock among them, play a trick on the prosecutor getting him to demand “who was that woman” at the very same moment that Millie’s daughter Connie arrives to testify that her mother shot Damier to save her from his molestation. The murderess is found justified in her crime and is returned to the loving arms of her ex-husband’s family, the mother having always loved her former daughter-in-law. Accordingly, a movie that appeared to take joyful pleasure in the rising feminist independence of its characters Minnie and her lesbian friends, ends with Tommy’s observation, “It looks like Millie’s going back home,” as if she were Dorothy of the Wizard of Oz returning to her god forsaken Kansas or Meet Me in St. Louis’ Esther Smith, absolutely overjoyed in remaining in good ole St. Louis instead of having to move to New York City. As Millie herself says early in the film, “Independence seems to be a hard thing to hold on to.”

      If nothing else, after this film, RKO made certain that nearly all of the movies in which the wonderful Helen Twelvetrees appeared were of just such a tear-jerking nature typecasting her in a way that ended her career far too early.

 

Los Angeles, January 10, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2023).