One of my library dvds arrived today, so we were in luck because we had a movie to watch and review. Pretty doggone cool, right? It was called "Marked Woman" (1937), starring Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart, and boy was it ever strong stuff, an uncompromising story of a young woman (Davis), who works as a nightclub "hostess" for a ruthless crime boss (Eduardo Cianelli). He has taken over the club from the previous owner, who treated his girls with more respect and allowed them more leeway in what they were expected to do for the customers.
To be blunt, movies from this era never explicitly mentioned prostitution. They only alluded to it.
But the message in "Marked Woman" is more overt than usual, and it is clear from the opening scene that this is what the hostesses are secretly engaged in. With the former owner, the behind-the-scenes action was understood and easygoing. Customers came in to the club for a drink and a dance with the hostesses; anything that happened afterward, upstairs or in a hotel, was discrete. Just so long as the owner got his cut of any money earned from extracurricular activity, everything was simpatico.
But the new owner Cianelli is a Mafia psycho. He is not content to run a simple nightclub with surreptitious prostitution. He also wants to rip his customers off for everything he can get from them. He overcharges for drinks, uses the girls to encourage more rounds. He has his henchmen find out where the male customers are staying so that he can potentially steal from their hotel rooms. Basically he uses every angle he can to squeeze every last dollar out of a customer, and he also has a casino in his club that he runs in the same way. Get the customers drunk, have the girls entice them to bet, the card games are rigged so they lose.
The movie, though, is about the violence a sociopath is willing to commit to maintain his underworld status, and what happens is that a drunken patron is losing big at the card table. He asks if the house will accept a check. They do accept, but of course the check is phony. The guy is broke. What he didn't take into account is that the club owner is a hoodlum. Bette Davis tries to warn the guy to leave town as soon as possible, but he fails to heed her advice and turns up dead.
The real action begins, however, after Davis' little sister arrives for a visit. She is a clean-cut college student who has been under the assumption that older sis Davis works as a model in a high class dress shop. Little sister comes to the apartment to find several other attractive girls hanging around. They don't know Davis is keeping her occupation a secret, and they are "talking shop" about the customers and the owner. The little sister picks up on the gist and is at first totally disillusioned. But then one night, one of the girls invites her to come along to a party. It's the same thing we heard the other night, where she can make money "just by looking pretty". The little sister is now curious, and excited by the energy of New York, so she dresses up for the party........and returns late that night with a hundred dollar bill in her hand. I have left out a description of the party itself, which is very blunt indeed for 1937 and involves a fat older man of about 60, who is wealthy, setting himself up to be introduced in the club to this new girl, Bette Davis' little sister, a newbie who has no experience with this type of lifestyle.
This scene, muted though it is in Golden Era stylistics, is nevertheless so direct, even by today's standards, that the viewer is understandably revulsed, as he or she is meant to be.
This scene is indicative of the emotional power of this film, where you are so sickened by these people - who have always existed and persist to this day - that you have sided with Humphrey Bogart as the crusading District Attorney from the moment he appears on screen. If you hate criminals even half as much as I do, your emotional involvement after this nightclub sequence will be substantial.
It feels like "Taxi Driver", forty years beforehand.
Once the little sister enters the movie, the plot takes off, and as always I will tell you no more to avoid spoilers. "Marked Woman" is exceptionally well acted, by Davis of course, who was a young woman here. She was still developing her technique, which was stylistic and not what you would call "natural" acting. Because of this, she became an icon of the super slick studio age, but still she was one of the greatest actresses of all time, and I think she gives one of her best performances here.
Eduardo Cianelli is also great as the murderous nightclub owner. If you go back to the 1970s or 80s, think Eddie Nash. That's how big a slimeball Cianelli's character is.
Bogart, in a Good Guy role, is doing everything he can to nail the mobster, but - like Trump - he seems immune to prosecution.
Watch "Marked Woman" to find out if he gets what's coming to him. In retrospect, I thought it was especially significant that I saw this film on International Women's Day, because this film is a woman's story above all. There is an unflinching look at what women have gone through, the violence they have experienced and the fear they have felt in their subjugation to powerful criminal men. In one scene, Bette Davis is beaten to a pulp and winds up in the hospital, only to give an incredible speech of resolve, which leads to Cianelli's downfall. I am sorry to have to mention this scene, but I do so precisely because it tells the truth, and because I was so impressed that such a scene would be shown in a movie from 82 years ago. And if there is one woman you don't mess with, it's Bette Davis. Take that, hoodlums.
So you can see that "Marked Woman" was a dramatically effective film, and it will probably have a similar effect on you should you ever watch it. It is on the brutal side, but it also shows the need for a courageous person, even just one, to stand up against the forces of evil.
That's what it's about, and I give it Two Thumbs Up of the highest order. ////
We are now 8 days into March, but wouldn't you know it, we are back to being freezing cold here in the Valley, in what I will call The Winter That Seems To Have No End. Midwesterners would rightfully laugh, but me, I am praying for relief. Even a 70 degree day would feel warm at this point, haha. What happens is that it gets in my bones and I can't get warm. Maybe I'm a wimp, I dunno.
Anyway, I am reading my Roswell book and my Martin Luther King book. I finished my Robert Kennedy book by Lisa Pease and I urge you to read it. It's importance to history and to the future of our country cannot be overstated.
That's all I know for tonight. See you in the morning. Love through the night. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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