Jean Muir: Two Films

Turner Classic Movies recently showed two movies with Jean Muir, a largely-forgotten actress of the 30's who was blacklisted in the 50's.  Though both these roles could be called supporting roles they were significant in these two Warner Brothers films, both made in 1934 and each running slightly more than 70 minutes.

G.W. Pabst's A Modern Hero stars Richard Barthelmess, a silent-film star for D.W. Griffith (Way Down East, 1920) who struggled in the sound era.  This is the one American film that Pabst made.  He had success with American actress Louise Brooks in the silent period in Germany (Pandora's Box, 1929) and after he made A Modern Hero he returned to Germany, staying there during the war under murky circumstances (he went there for his father's funeral and, he said, was not allowed to leave).  In any case, A Modern Hero is a gem, something of a diamond in the rough of Pabst's career.  Barthelmess plays the ironic "hero" who uses wealthy widows to finance his career, from making bicycles to making motorcars in the early part of the 20th C.  He came to America originally as a circus performer with his mother, who lost an arm  to a leopard in her animal act after being deserted by her wealthy lover.  Jean Muir plays the mother of Barthelmess's out-of-wedlock son whom he rediscovers later in life. Muir continues to reject Barthelmess and their son dies in an accident, driving a car his father gave him.  In a dark scene indeed the son' s coffin arrives on a train in a rainstorm and Muir won't even talk to Barthelmess.  In an expressionistic film full of ironies Barthelmess eventually loses all his money and returns home to his alcoholic mother, played intensely by Marjorie Rambeau.

If there are those who think movies of the 30's are not relevant today, they should see Alfred E. Green's Gentlemen are Born, another ironic title, about four college graduates struggling to find jobs in the Depression.  Green was a workmanlike director for Warner Brothers who was occasionally inspired by his material, as he was here.  Jean Muir plays a supportive wife who helps her unemployed husband through hard times, as the college graduates come to believe, as the banking father of one of them says, "one can't figure it any way but in dollars and cents," an attitude still common among many college graduates.  The banking father jumps out a window and one of the four graduates is killed when the owner of a pawnshop thinks he is being robbed. The remaining college graduates continue to struggle, eventually realizing the important thing is to never give up.  Jean Muir and her husband have a baby and look towards the future, while the banker's daughter marries someone whom her mother thought was out of her class. Everyone continues to struggle to pay the rent and put food on the table.