Wed 9 Aug 2017
Movie Review: THEY CALL IT SIN (1932).
Posted by Steve under Films: Drama/Romance , Reviews[6] Comments
THEY CALL IT SIN. First National Pictures, 1932. Loretta Young, George Brent, Una Merkel, David Manners, Helen Vinson, Louis Calhern. Director: Thornton Freeland.
The biggest attraction this small unprepossessing pre-Code film has is luminously beautiful Loretta Young, only 19 years old at the time and an actress you just knew was going somewhere, even in 1932.
It’s kind of a silly film, but with themes I’m sure resonated with audiences at the time, in the depths of the Depression. When a traveling salesman of sorts (David Manners) hits a small town in Kansas, he’s already engaged to a girl back in Manhattan, and he has no idea he’ll find himself so completely smitten by the girl he finds playing the organ in church on Sunday morning.
Her parents have small town values, but Marion Cullen doesn’t share them. There is a reason for that, which I won’t go into, and she sees in Jimmy a way to leave her particular small town behind, and she does, following him to New York, thinking that he loves her.
Which he does, deeply, but as I mentioned up above, he already have a fiancée, and reluctantly he does the honorable thing. But what this does is leave Marian on her own in the big city, a theme of forbidden fruit, I imagine, to small-town audiences.
She does all right, though, and I doubt that you will be surprised to have me tell you that. First she hooks up with another would-be Broadway starlet named Dixie Dare (Una Merkel), but then has to fend off the advances of a lecherous but well-known producer.
Nor is he the only one. A doctor friend of Jimmy (George Brent) has his eyes on her, too. Beauty, it seems, is not to be denied.
It is around this point of its running time that the film takes on a somewhat darker tone, but even though this film has been released on DVD as part of a box set of pre-Code movies, there are only hints of really dastardly stuff. We do get to see the charming Dixie Dark romping around in her room in her lingerie, though, which is a fact that seems well worth mentioning. Mostly, though, this is entertaining fun, a film that today would be hard-pressed to even make it into the PG category.
August 9th, 2017 at 11:05 pm
Young, who was notably Catholic, and notably pure, played not a few just-the-right-side-of-bad girls in many Pre Code films, including adulterous wives and girls like Marion.
August 10th, 2017 at 9:21 am
I’m not slut shaming her, but it come out after her death that her “adopted” daughter was actually her birth daughter fathered by Clark Gable during their love affair. The daughter has talked about meeting Gable as a child.
August 10th, 2017 at 10:13 am
Judy Lewis had something in common with my wife: her name!
August 10th, 2017 at 9:31 am
Manhattan New York or Manhattan Kansas?
August 10th, 2017 at 10:15 am
My smile of the day. A big one!
August 10th, 2017 at 10:32 am
Not to correct Rick Libott, who is obviously in a far better position to know, but my recollection is that Judy Lewis’s book about her parental situation came out during Loretta Young’s lifetime.
This led to an estrangement between the two of them, which was resolved just prior to Loretta Young’s death.