Uncouth Reflections

Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:

This 1933 George Arliss vehicle focuses on a getting-ready-to-retire shoe magnate. His vitality is so reliant on competition that he covertly goes to work for his rivals when their fortunes begin to fail. The company, launched by his onetime buddy and romantic adversary, has foundered under his spendthrift progeny, and Arliss just can’t bear to see it sink below the waves. By reviving it he’s reviving his youth, his relevance. Arliss’ performance is a lot of fun: Doddering a little, uncertain as to how to secure his legacy, he suggests a fuzzier and much shrewder Lear. And he’s an apt foil for the young Bette Davis, who has some nice moments in a role that’s like an inversion of those familiar from screwball comedy. (She’s an heiress who runs towards home rather than away from it.) In fact, the whole movie seems consciously poised against the screwball attitudes then emerging in Hollywood comedy: It stands up for the squareness of the suburbs, the WASP work ethic, and the inherent wisdom of the elderly. Plot-wise, everything ties up neatly, and director John Adolfi has a clean, efficient way with interior dialog scenes. The movie could be sexier, but then its target seems to be older viewers who like to complain about the irresponsibility of spoiled young whippersnappers. Old people go to movies too, you know. It’s on Warner Instant.

Related

• Arliss was a big deal at the time. He had his own production unit at Warner, hand-picked Adolfi as his director, and was an early booster of Bette Davis. Along with Marie Dressler, one of MGM’s biggest draws of the early ’30s, Arliss represents a bygone class of movie star: those famous because of their advanced age not in spite of it.