Exit Smiling and Two Seconds

Exit Smiling (1926) is one of five movies that Bea Lillie made (she much preferred to hear the responses of live audiences); in it she shows quite a talent not only for graceful physical comedy but also for poignancy.  In the funniest scene she practically destroys a room trying to buy time for her unjustly accused lover, only to have him reject her for his hometown sweetheart.  The last shot of the film shows her expressing her loss with a close-up worthy of Chaplin.  Under the direction of Sam Taylor, who worked regularly with Harold Lloyd, Lillie does a delightful job of portraying life in a small traveling theatrical troupe, with all its poverty and petty rivalries.  I did see Lillie in person once, not in one of her many highly-praised theatrical performances (I'm too young for that) but at the Museum of Modern Art in 1971, when scholar Miles Kreuger did a series of early musicals and included Are You There? (1930) in which Lillie has a charming role as a telephone operator.  Lillie made an appearance, lamented that she was too late to take her clothes off in movies, and attempted to disrobe, before Kreuger hustled her off!

Mervyn Leroy's Two Seconds is one of six intense movies he made in 1932, all with a social consciousness common at First National (later Warner Brothers) at the time.  It tells the story of a working class stiff, played by Edward G. Robinson, who is betrayed by a woman and kills her.  The "two seconds" refers to the time it takes to execute him in the electric chair and it is during those two seconds that the film flashes back to the events leading up to his execution, as he falls in love with a dame at a dime-a-dance joint who gets him drunk and convinces him to marry her, mainly because she can "get away with more as a Mrs. than as a Miss."  The movie has been compared to Ambrose Bierce's An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1890) but Leroy does not try to convince one that the flashbacks are taking place in the mind of the man being executed, so the effect is very different.