“That Certain Woman” (1937) was the 3rd of a group of Bette movies I watched all in one night and was, by far, my favorite. Sadly, my copy of the film is poor, which you’ll confirm by looking at my screencaps. It’s available on DVD now but at a hefty price, so I won’t be getting a good copy of this any time soon. But if you get a chance to see this film, do! “That Certain Woman” is one of the few 1930s Bette melodramas that distinguishes itself from the others that so often feel like Kay Francis’ castoffs.

For some reason, the copy TCM has covers the edges of the title screen with a grey border so you can’t see the usual “First National Picture” credit on the bottom. No idea why. I assume it’s a re-release print with some copyright issue.

The plot of “That Certain Woman” is compelling in a way that your usual WB programmer isn’t. Bette is Mary Donnell, who we first see going to the cemetery on a cold, rainy evening in 1933. She’s followed there by a reporter who confronts her: She’s the former Mrs. Al Haines, widowed exactly 4 years earlier when her gangster husband was killed in the St. Valentine’s Day massacre. The reporter is doing a “where are they now” series on people involved in the massacre, but Mary won’t have anything to do with it. She’s got a job as a secretary now, a new life, and is as far away from the mob as she can be.

Unfortunately, the reporter knows about her new life and confronts her at her work. She’s afraid her boss Lloyd Rogers (Ian Hunter) will find out about her past, but it turns out he knew anyway. He’s smitten with Mary but, of course, Mary is smitten with someone else — a client’s son, Jack (Henry Fonda).

When Lloyd helps her out with the newspaper situation and with Jack as well, there is a moment where a positively radiant Mary runs up to Lloyd’s desk and thanks him.

It’s an expression of undiluted joy that lasts a brief instant and is gone as Mary runs out of the office to her love. The close-up on Mary’s face is tight but doesn’t linger, although the viewer is left with the image of Mary’s happiness long after she’s left the room. When a saddened Lloyd realizes that he and Mary were not meant to be, you genuinely feel his sense of loss.

Mary and Jack elope but Jack, being your standard soaper rich boy, is coerced away from her almost immediately by his overbearing father who knows Mary’s past. In a plot point used in something like five million weepies from 1925 through 1945 inclusive, Mary is pregnant when Jack leaves and doesn’t tell him, deciding she only wants him if he comes back on his own. He doesn’t. Instead, Mary raises her son on her own with financial help from Lloyd. Meanwhile, Jack marries some society dame. He soon causes a car wreck, seriously disabling his wife Flip (Anita Louise).

A few years pass; it’s now 1937. Lloyd, still in love with Mary, visits her while he’s seriously ill. He dies at her apartment while yet another snoopy reporter is hanging around, and Lloyd’s newly-widowed wife thinks Mary’s son was fathered by Lloyd. The press has a field day with the scandal. Even though Mary won’t reveal that Jack was really the father, Jack still discovers that he had a son and comes back to Mary, promising to divorce the now-disabled Flip and marry Mary for real this time.

Except Flip visits Mary herself and confesses she can’t be a real wife to Jack because of her injuries, she probably doesn’t have long to live, and of course she can’t have kids, so she wants Mary to take Jack so he can be happy. Mary, out of guilt and self-sacrifice and all those other things that make good melodrama, instead decides to give up her son and let Jack and Flip raise him.

At this point, the movie turns inadvertently cruel: Mary apparently goes around Europe looking fabulous and distraught, just waiting for Flip to die.

One day she gets a call from Jack that Flip’s finally dead, and she and Jack practically cheer at the news. You have to laugh, because that is some screwed up shit right there. Jack is the one responsible for the fact that Flip lived for years in pain before dying decades before her time, and he’s also responsible for Mary’s predicament in being a single mother. Why anyone thought it was appropriate for him to be calling Mary with the “good news” that his wife Flip was dead is beyond me, but I admit I enjoyed the ending immensely.

Also, Ian Hunter is terrific. I am loving the hell out of Ian Hunter right now. He is so good in these programmers because he actually works at his role, he never seems bored or like he’s holding back. I’m lookin’ at you, George Brent.  That said, I forget Ian is even in films like “Robin Hood” or “Ziegfield Girl,” so perhaps sometimes he doesn’t make much of an impression. Or maybe it’s just me.

Bette rocks a lot of looks in this film. When we first see her she’s dowdied up, looking for all the world like she did in the early 1930s when at Universal, except in fashions that were out of date even in 1933. I thought that was a terrific touch, not only giving the movie the feel of 1933, but also showing Mary as a girl who hadn’t moved on from what happened to her in 1929.

It’s also obvious that a lot of effort was spent to give Bette significant movie star appeal. Bette herself said that the first time she honestly looked like a star was when director Edmond Goulding worked with her in “That Certain Woman.” It seems odd for her to say such a thing, since in previous years she had been in “Petrified Forest” and “Of Human Bondage”, and even won an Oscar in “Dangerous,” but it’s true that WB was simply not treating her like one of their big name stars. I would argue, though, that the real change for Bette came with “Marked Woman” released a few months earlier, and which I believe was the first film she did after her suit against WB semi-failed.

It’s hard to see because of the poor video quality, but there is a little lovely art deco in Lloyd’s office in the beginning:

“That Certain Woman” is available on the WB Archives series if anyone has an extra $23.00 laying around. Silly sellers online are still charging $30.00 for their used VHS of the movie. The point is, it’s out there in legitimate copies, if you want to shell out significant dough for it.

Lobby card for the film. I don’t remember this scene at all.

“Front Page Woman” was released a mere six weeks after “The Girl from 10th Avenue”, and it shows. These two programmers share 6 cast members and even some of the same sets. Long-time readers will remember how tired I have become of George Brent playing the guy trying to keep a woman in the home where she belongs. Well, folks, “Front Page Woman” is by far the worst offender in that category… thus far.

Ellen (Bette Davis) is a young reporter assigned to cover the execution of a murderer at midnight. Boyfriend and fellow reporter Curt (Brent) doesn’t think a woman should be reporting on such a thing and, true to 1935, Ellen faints to prove how right he was. I’m surprised she didn’t lose a heel while running or fend off the bad guy by hitting him with her purse. Maybe I should mention that Curt and the other reporters deliberately set out to upset her with graphic talk about the execution.

Curt writes two news stories, one for his paper and one for Ellen’s to cover for her womanly inability to report the news, but a screw-up causes the exact story to go into both papers. Ellen thinks he deliberately sabotaged her, and he might as well have: At a 3-alarm fire, Ellen is not allowed in to the area to report on the news because she’s a woman. Curt adds to this problem by lying to the police officers that she’s not even a reporter in the first place.

But she sneaks into the area anyway and sees Marvin Stone (Huntley Gordon, who just happens to be in the featured photo for October in the AMS Silent Movie Calendar, which I’m looking at right now.) Ellen realizes Stone is important in the mystery of who started the fire, but he disappears, only to turn up dead at the hospital. Curt, angry that Ellen found all this out on her womanly own, what with being a dumb woman and all, wants her to quit her job and marry him instead. She agrees that if Curt solves the arson and murder before she does, she’ll quit and marry him. He responds by stealing her scoop on Marvin Stone.

I want to mention at this point that the movie (and I assume the Saturday Evening Post story it was based on) don’t feel it’s enough to disparage Ellen. They include the character of Nell, a large 40-something woman who is referred to only by her weight, veiled negative references to her assumed lesbianism, and how “ugly” she is:

Oh yeah, she’s so ugly, how can anyone bear to exist near such hideousness, etc. etc. Grace Hayle is gets no screen credit here, but she rarely did in any film, although the official off-screen credit for her roles were usually “Fat Lady” or “Chubby Woman”. Not just in the 1930s, but straight through to the 1950s. Also, her stereotypical lesbian garb in “Front Page Woman” was still in use nearly 30 years later for the dismissive ornithologist in “The Birds.” Hollywood ain’t exactly progressive.

Moving on: In the course of digging around to find out what happened, she gets held at gunpoint by Inez (Winifred Shaw) and Curt knows this, but refuses to help her in any way to “teach her once and for all that a woman’s place is in the home.” And I suppose if the desperate and obviously-involved-in-murder Inez shoots Ellen, that will really teach her.

Curt then interferes with the trial of the person who allegedly murdered Stone, not just by eavesdropping on the jury, but by creating phony jury ballots and leaving them in the jury room so Ellen sees the wrong verdict. When she falls for the stunt and both papers get published before the verdict was even given — Ellen’s with the wrong verdict, Curt’s with the correct one — the judge gets a little pissed at Curt. Finally. Man, by this point in the film I was seething. Curt was portrayed as though he was the freakin’ police commissioner with everything he got away with up until that point, and the unethical way he stole others’ work and his interference in an important court case was so unbelievably wrong. But I had to laugh at New York Times reviewer Frank S. Nugent who wrote of this impossible scenario that “we have no doubt that any reporter showing his press card in the lobby of the Strand after a performance will be mobbed by hordes of autograph seekers.”

Ellen gets the last laugh by getting a confession from the real murderer, and Curt pretends he thinks women really are as good as men, so she quits her job and they get married.

Unbe-freakin-lievable.

I could have forgiven a lot if this film hadn’t looked so much like “Girl from 10th Avenue,” which I had just watched, and which people in 1935 would have just seen a few weeks earlier. Here’s an example of the similarity:

Phone booths in “Girl from 10th Avenue.”

Phone booths in “Front Page Woman.”

I believe the apartment Bette and Ian Hunter share in “Girl From 10th Avenue” is the same set seen briefly inside the apartment building that burns down in “Front Page Woman,” too.

Also if the film hadn’t required me to suspend 100% of my disbelief, I would have been happier. Oh, I’ll suspend some disbelief. You gotta suspend if you want to watch movies, but this movie asked too much of me and I wasn’t willing to give it as much leeway as it needed to be entertaining.

The good news is I really, really liked the next Bette film that I’ll post about in the Project, so you get a reprieve from hearing me bitch about her early work. For a while, at least.