Woman in the Dark (1934)

I almost never watch or listen to narratively based audiovisual entertainment.  This includes movies, TV shows, but also podcasts.  It's just usually a problem for me.  I get too invested, it makes me uncomfortable, and I turn it off ten or twenty minutes in.

So any time I do finish something I figure that's worth remarking on.  In this case, a friend of mine mentioned how excited she was about a film she loved but nobody else seemed to care about was getting restored and re-released.  I'd never heard of the film myself, but I recognized well the feeling.  I've felt that way about a number of things, a number of times.  She's also extremely knowledgeable and enthusiastic about early film, so just her really liking the film made me very much want to watch it.

I am, having said that, probably not really well suited to appreciate it.  I don't really know much at all about 1930s film, about the milieu, about the people involved.  Honestly I'm spending as long doing research about it now as I did watching the film, which was fairly short.  There are a lot of things about the picture that surprised me but that probably aren't uncommon to the pictures of the era.  I have a hard time picking out what makes this picture exceptional to someone who's seen a fair number of 1930s films, instead of just two or three.

For starters I really don't know most of the people involved.  Fay Wray of course I know from King Kong and only King Kong.  Dashiell Hammett, who wrote the novel the film was based on, him I know as well.  Phil Rosen?  Sada Cowan?  These names mean nothing to me.  I don't know Ralph Bellamy or Melvyn Douglas, though their names ring a bell.

What really struck from the start was the blatant infodumping.  I feel like in a lot of ways films of this era could be (often had to be, Hays code and all that) more nuanced and subtle about the way they conveyed information than films sometimes are today, but in this case we get some scenes that openly explain not just the male lead's backstory, but also his character and motivation.  I'm used to the "show, don't tell" dictum, and this film does a lot of explaining up front.

The whole first half of the film, really, is just tremendously interesting in the way that it reminds me of (and this is my limited frame of reference) a soap opera or an old Doctor Who episode more than it does a major motion picture.  The impression I get is that this was not a prestige picture, this was a B-film done on the cheap.  I don't know how true that is, or if it more occupied some grey space in between blockbusters like "King Kong" and the "poverty row" films I've seen referenced, but haven't actually seen.

The quality of the acting is also, well, highly variable.  Wray is great.  Bellamy, Douglas, they are good once one adjusts to the differences in acting style of the times.  Nell O'Day is fucking terrible.

Once I adjusted to the variances in scripting style, the extremely structured and closed-ended nature of the plot, which means that pretty much nothing happens other than to drive the plot forward, I rapidly did get absorbed in the film, which is a rare thing for me.  The old films have a different approach to audience expectations.  They're willing to be more openly manipulative.  Sometimes that means they're less convincing to the modern eye.  At one point Wray's character suddenly significantly changes her mind about something extremely important, and I wonder if perhaps the viewer is supposed to take this as a betrayal in the same sense the male lead does.  I enjoy very much the overall sense of uncertainty that seems to not have been uncommon to the films of this era, and in particular not uncommon to Hammett's work, but, well, I do overthink things.  I'm not just thinking about what the characters' motivations are here, but about the writer's motivations.  I overcomplicate things.

So I didn't like the second half of the movie, which is much busier and more complicated, as much as the comparatively straightforward first.  All these twists and turns and I sort of lose track of the heart of the film, and it is a fucking great heart.

Because at its core, it's a film about powerful abusers, and particularly and especially people who abuse women, and how those of us who are socially stigmatized try to negotiate that reality, try to protect ourselves.  I did still find it a little optimistic, a little unrealistic, in that the law enforcement, upon discovering the "upstanding citizen" directly attempting to murder his employee, were convinced of his guilt by direct, irrefutable evidence.  It's a reasonable assumption to make, but here we are having presented irrefutable evidence of abuse, and we are denied and dismissed over and over again.  Like Wray and Bellamy's characters, we are not considered credible.  I think that was what was hard about the ending for me.