Sat 24 Oct 2009
Movie Review: SIN TAKES A HOLIDAY (1930).
Posted by Steve under Films: Comedy/Musicals , Reviews[3] Comments
SIN TAKES A HOLIDAY. Pathé Exchange, 1930. Constance Bennett, Kenneth MacKenna, Basil Rathbone, Rita La Roy, Zasu Pitts. Director: Paul L. Stein.
Besides the two “Topper” movies she was in, I don’t think I’ve seen any of the other movies that Constance Bennett made. For a name that’s awfully familiar, not to mention being a beautiful and talented sad-eyed actress, she made a rather large number of awfully forgettable pictures.
Including this one, I’m sorry to say, one that TCM chose to play on her birthday earlier this week (October 22). She plays the secretary who’s secretly in love with her playboy boss (played by Kenneth MacKenna), a well-known divorce lawyer. But when he proposes to her, it’s with no sense of delight that she accepts.
It’s a marriage of convenience only. He needs a wife to get one of his many divorcee clients (Rita La Roy) off his back. Little does he know when he sends his new bride off to Europe that she’s going to turn into a glowing beauty. (She also somehow learns to play classical musical pieces on the piano; quite a change from living in a cramped apartment with two other working girls, one of whom is Zasu Pitts.)
Basil Rathbone plays the jaded bachelor who falls in love with her, and this is the triangle (or quadrilateral, if Miss La Roy is included) that the plot revolves around, and all the more so once the lady’s husband decides that maybe he really does want a wife.
Being a pre-Code movie, the light-hearted way that men in upper society are allowed to pal around with women who are not their wives would scarcely meet with approval a few years later.
Unfortunately for those of us who happen to have spent the first 60 plus minutes waiting for a payoff that matches the rest of the film, the wait will have been in vain. There are many many clever ways that this movie could have ended. The way that this movie does end – and don’t worry, I shan’t tell you which one it is — it isn’t one of them.
October 25th, 2009 at 12:50 am
Kenneth MacKenna has one interesting credit, he played Bulldog Drummond in the ‘lost’ Drummond talkie Temple Tower.
Always seems odd to see Rathbone in these romantic roles, but he did quite a few of them, and was the model for Du Maurier’s Maxim de Winter in Rebbeca (he was a cousin of Du Maurier and an uncle or great uncle of thriller writer Desmond Bagley) and the hero of her Frenchman’s Creek (ironically in the film he played the villain), and Margaret Mitchell’s first choice to play Rhett Butler.
He’s quite good in Agatha Christie’s Love From a Stranger with Ann Harding (Joan Hickson in a small touch of irony plays a maid), and as the charming con man and killer in the film of the Hugh Walpole story and Edward Chordorov play Kind Lady (1936) with Ailene MacMahon (critics aside I prefer this to the remake with Maurice
Evans and Ethel Barrymore).
He even shows up in a few comedies like the one above. A shame that in later years he was stereotyped as villains and Holmes, though he did appear in the Red Skelton/Esther Williams musical Bathing Beauty.
October 25th, 2009 at 1:39 am
In many ways Rathbone is the best actor in this movie. But as you say, for anyone who knows him primarily as Holmes, it’s going take a while to accept him as a significant part of the romantic tangle that’s involved here and not just a comedic second banana — which of course would have been a stretch in itself — but that’s where I originally thought this movie was going.
Not so!
September 2nd, 2017 at 7:04 pm
I know this might not be rated as one of the best movies on the hit parade but I love the subtle humor. And the word “comedy” is rightly spoken. This is comedy the way it should be. Not today’s raw, bawdy and often times embarrassing and cruel. I love this kind of movie. And I have always enjoyed Constance Bennett. And yes! Mr. Rathbone is quite clever and original. Thank you for making the viewing of this movie possible