John M. Stahl's Strictly Dishonorable

John M. Stahl is mostly known today (to the extent he is known at all) for his melodramas -- Imitation of Life in 1934, Leave Her to Heaven in 1945, et al. -- but he was also quite skilled with comedy, as in Strictly Dishonorable in 1931, from a Preston Sturges play.  The film stars Paul Lucas as a womanizing opera singer and Sidney Fox as the sweet girl who is the target of his lust (need I mention that this is a pre-Code film, with all of Sturges's sexual innuendo intact?).  Fox and the annoying George Meeker are planning to marry and live with his mother in West Orange, N.J. but they stop at a speakeasy and everything changes.  Lewis Stone, later Andy Hardy's father, is an inebriated judge who lives upstairs, just as the opera singer Paul Lukas does.  Lukas tries to seduce Fox but ends up smitten by her sweetness, while Stone gets Meeker out of the way by telling Irish cop Mulligan (Sidney Toler) that Meeker is an Orangeman and convinces Mulligan to put him in jail for the night.

Perhaps if Hollywood had not instituted the Code Sturges might not have felt the need to direct his own films, not only for control but to circumvent the Code, as he did so brilliantly in The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944).  In Strictly Dishonorable Lukas uses those exact words to describe for Fox his intentions, though Stahl leaves it ambiguous as to whether Fox understands what that means and whether it appeals to her, as she is too busy looking at the cigarette butts in Lukas's ashtrays and  noticing the lipstick.  Bringing the opera singer and the naïve girl from the South together was possibly Sturges's tribute to the influences of his father's practicality and his mother's interest in culture.  Stahl and cinematographer Karl Freund (who had worked with Murnau) keep the plot, the dialogue and the camera moving through the two basic sets, as the night gradually turns to morning.