LILLY TURNER (1933)

Spoliers included!!
This is an interesting pre-Code film with a good performance by Ruth Chatterton. As was the case with many pre-Code heroines, Chatterton is an fairly naive young girl who has to wise up fast. We get almost no background about her except that she's from Buffalo, and the movie begins as she marries a handsome fast-talking fellow (Gordon Westcott) who is referred to as an actor in the wedding scene, but is actually a fading vaudevillian. He and Chatterton wind up working for a carnival and she soon finds out that her husband is a scoundrel--and a bigamist. He leaves Chatterton while she's pregnant and nice guy alcoholic Frank McHugh offers to marry her. They're friends and the arrangement seems strictly for convenience. They join up with a traveling "medicine" show and Chatterton meets handsome George Brent, an engineer who is working as a taxi driver because he can't get a job (the Depression, you know). He joins the show and they wind up in something approaching a threesome (with McHugh as essentially a platonic friend) which goes along swell for a while, until a crazy German strong man (Robert Barrat) who had a thing for Lilly, escapes from an asylum and threatens to ruin everyone's lives.

The downward arc of the self-sacrificing woman is nothing new--for me, what was new in the film happened at the very end. Just as Brent has accepted an engineering job in New Mexico and is planning on leaving with Chatterton, the crazy German returns and throws McHugh out of a window, fracturing his spine. Chatterton (not surprisingly) decides she owes it to McHugh to stay with him. The more surprising thing is that Brent decides to turn down the job and stay with Chatterton, implying that their technically adulterous threesome will continue. Not exactly the happiest ending for anyone, but an interesting one that would have been banned by the code a year later. The acting was good all around, with Chatterton seeming particularly "modern," eschewing heightened melodramatics, for the most part. Brent is as good as I've ever seen him, and he looks at times like Ronald Reagan. McHugh, who I always like, is fine, as is Barrat and Guy Kibbee as the owner of the medicine show. Also with Grant Mitchell and Ruth Donnelly. Many published critics don't like this one, but I found it to be better than many similar films of the era and was glad to have seen it. [TCM]