Feathers & Lulu… Love ‘Em and Leave ‘Em (1926), BFI with Meg Morley

This blog has been driven by obsession and a subjective emotional “canon” from its earliest days (no, please don’t look!) and Louise Brooks has, of course been the main one, with a copy of Pandora’s Box on DVD bought from a second-hand shop in Park Street, Bristol in 2005 starting off the whole interest and viewing the same film on film at the Prince Charles Cinema in 2010, with John Sweeney accompanying, sealing the deal. I ws hooked and my long term aim since then has been to see all the extant Brooks films on screen with live accompaniment and I even waited over a decade after buying the DVD to see Diary of a Lost Girl in its natural environment. That’s dedication to delayed gratification or just simple stupidity. Who can tell?

This film is one of the few remaining unseen on-screen and viewing the BFI’s worn, warm and wonderful 16mm flickering on the NFT2 screen, with Meg Morley’s wonderful syncopations and sparkling improvisations following an introduction from Bryony Dixon has, to paraphrase the poet, helped make not only my day, my week, my month and even my year.

 

I have seen Love ‘Em and Leave ‘Em on grey-market DVD from Grapevine a number of times but not for some time – 2012! - and here I could make out more of the nuance in both Louise Brooks’ and, especially Evelyn Brent’s performance and, whilst it’s only a slight comedy, it is an all too rare example of such standard fare featuring these two. As Bryony said, many may come to Love ‘Em and Leave ‘Em for Brooksie but stay for Brent who here gets to play Big Sister with warmth and wit.

Evelyn is probably best known for the films she made with Joseph von Sternberg, the lost The Drag-Net (1928), The Last Command (1928) and, especially, Underworld (1927) in which she plays Feathers McCoy but, as with Brooks, even though she has some excellent classic films to her name, her career never really maintained its momentum and she ended up so often playing, as her biographers² say, “Hollywood’s Lady Crook” with increasingly smaller parts as the thirties and forties wore on. Still, as with Louise, we can at least celebrate some of her finest work and today’s film illustrates perfectly her ability as a star performer albeit in very standard fare.

 

Brooks' Black Bottom I believe?

Directed by Frank Tuttle primarily as a vehicle for Brent it also providing the then teenage Louise Brooks’ biggest role on what seemed like an unstoppable rise and, indeed, Bryony quoted a number of favourable reviews which took this a confirmation that the 19-year old actress, whose previous roles had been bit parts in The American Venus (1926) – sadly, mostly lost, although most of her shots survive – and The Street of Forgotten Men (1926) – recently restored by the SFSFF – could actually act as well as dance and look sublime.

 

By contrast Brent was 28, had started in films in the late 1910s, spent four years on stage and in film in Great Britain making Trapped by the Mormons (1922) which has to be seen to be believed. As per Barry Paris¹, Brooks’ biographer quoted in the BFI handout, Brooks and brent didn’t get on, with his subject feeling she was in a state of anxiety after all the years of promise, which meant she was too wound up for comedy. Brooks also felt too much time was spent on trying to light Evelyn properly to up the glam which, bless her, was just natural for our Lulu.

 

This is all a bit unkind for Brent has a fine profile and is well lit in a number of scenes breaking our hearts when she sees her dopey boyfriend Bill Billingsley (Lawrence Gray) kissing her younger sister Janie, played by Brooks just when she was due to surprise him with an engagement party having decided to accept his proposal. She was by this stage a very experienced actor and adds enough quality moments to this daft script to make the film one of my favourites of its type featuring two of the most interesting actors.

 

Evelyn Brent and Lawrence Gray

I can’t find anything of Brent’s opinion of Brooks but director Fred Tuttle was certainly impressed with his main star: “The more I knew (her) the more I admired her. I loved working with her and I loved her – but who didn’t?” Well, the lady from Cherryvale for one, the intellectual lawyers’ daughter who perhaps felt Brent, working class daughter of two teenagers from Syracuse, New York* was just unsophisticated? According to biographers Lynn Kerr and James King², Brent almost got replaced on this film by Esther Ralston only to be swiftly re-instated possibly after her then husband, movie moghul Bernie Fineman, “raised long-distance hell!”. Tuttle felt Brents’ “…qualities and appearance suited the part perfectly”, even compared with Esther.

 

 

Evelyn plays “Mame” Walsh a department store worker who shares a one-room apartment with her younger and wilder sister, after promising their mother on her deathbed that she would always look after her. This determination to fulfil this promise is needless to say stretched to the limit… as indeed is her loyalty to Bill who can barely get himself to work without her prodding. He’s a bit of a sap and doesn’t value Mame as much as he should – he doesn’t see how much she supports him providing the creativity for his otherwise mundane shop window displays.

 

 

Also in their block is the weaselly Lem Woodruff (Osgood Perkins) a man who "spent six months curing halitosis only to find he was unpopular anyway." He’s not to be trusted but, for some reason Janie lets him place bets for her at the bookies… which, when we learn that, improbably and for “good behaviour” she has been given the role of the shop’s ball committee treasurer. This can’t end well. Meanwhile as Bill’s displays lead to his promotion he proposes to Mame who, unsure they can afford marriage, goes on holiday leaving her little sister free to create chaos. Firstly she seduces Bill the Numpty and then, having gambled away the funds for the ball, is cheater out of winning it back by Lem.

 

Osgood Perkins, plays no-good Lem

Jannie is confronted about the missing money and implicates Mame who is given an ultimatum of returning the money before 11 or the police will be called. She lets Janie go to the ball – “I won't enjoy a single minute of the dance, worrying about you” - and sets off to settle the score with Lem the Louse and we get two wonderful set pieces, Brooks’ dancing The Black Bottom at the ball as she impresses the senior management team and the fight of her life with Mame taking on Lem for the money in a locked room with Bill racing to a rescue that, her pugilistic prowess renders irrelevant.

 

I like this display of forceful female agency and overall Mame always takes care of business looking after everything herself and hoping that Bill and Janie can ultimately catch up in terms of how much they rely on her.

 

Brooks is of course ablaze with youthful energy and your eyes are drawn in her every scene. She makes the most of a fairly narrow role and is absolutely believable as the irresponsible, self-serving teen who gets everyone into trouble. At this stage of their trajectories though Brent matches her with competence and experience. She doesn’t have the generational beauty of Brooks but she is eye-catching and, as ever, she was so much more than her later typecasting led folk – producers at least – to believe.

 

Louise provokes.

As Bryony said, neither woman had a manager directing their careers and both made bad choices. There are a thousand reasons why some actors do not sustain a career but with these two we can be sure that there could have been more, had they had the support and had they wanted it. Within months though Brent achieved stardom in Underworld and even Louise had to admit von Sternberg had brought out the best of her just as Pabst would do the same for her in time.

 

At least The Los Angeles Times was impressed with Brent, noting that this newest role “marks another step up the ladder of accomplishment for the young actress…” who, after two years at FBO, “is now a scintillating figure in her first Paramount feature…” one of  “the small group of freelance stars determined to play ‘better roles in the best films’”. Mr von Sternberg was nearly ready for her close up…

 

Meg Morley, just returned from the Bonn Silent Film Festival – you can catch her and Frank Bockius accompanying Shooting Stars (1928) on streaming until 20^th August – and her accompaniment was, as usual, pitch-perfect with a lovely swing matching Tuttle’s pacing, the movements and narrative. Meg’s music interlaced with the film in seamless ways catching the sweetness and sorrow but also Mame’s relentless optimism and strength. I also heard something of a Bechdel Bossa nova as the women’s relationship with each other was always of more consequence than that with the silly and faithless men!

 

A sold-out BFT2 had a great time and as one patron asked at the end, “when’s the Evelyn Brent season coming?” She won’t let us down!

 

Evelyn Brent

*Brent told many tales about her disrupted childhood, some of them true… she claimed later that they “led me to expect nothing of life except the fate of the moment.” Kansas City Star, 21^st June 1925

 

¹Barry Paris, Louise Brooks, Knopf (1989)

²Lynn Kerr with James King, Evelyn Brent, The Life and Films of Hollywood’s Lady Crook, McFarland & Company (2009)