Strictly Dishonorable

A wonderful poster, far more lurid than the actual film

John M. Stahl's Strictly Dishonorable, from 1931, is a pleasant comedy adapted from a Preston Sturges stage play. The play provides a blueprint for a prototypical screwball farce in which a Southern belle (Sidney Fox) ditches her stiff fiance (George Meeker auguring Ralph Bellamy) after encountering a romantic opera singer (Paul Lukas) in a New York speakeasy. The entire affair is set in the speakeasy building with both Lukas' character and Lewis Stone's "Judge" residing upstairs. thus, there is much going up and down the stairs according to the flow of the romantic tumult.

Stahl wisely does not try to open up the play, but frames his set pieces nicely and has his actors play to the camera and not the audience. A good example are the reaction shots of Lewis Stone, which preserve droll moments of scene stealing. Stone had prematurely white hair and was already typecast as an old sage dispensing wisdom to young lovers; even before his tenure as Judge Hardy. Karl Freund's camera work is nimble and looks startlingly crisp.

The diminutive Fox had some charm. She struck me as a slightly warmer Helen Hayes. Universal was trying to make her a star, but she was out of the business and dead by a probable suicide within ten years. Her career was not helped by gossip that she was schtupping both Carl Laemmle Senior and Junior. Lukas towers over her and is obviously having a blast playing a Continental lover. After seeing him as countless (usually Nazi) villains, it was a treat to see him in a sympathetic role.

Slightly Dishonorable is slightly creaky in its stage bound conventions and archaic attitudes. I shuddered to hear Ms. Fox reminiscing about the "happy darkies singing" back home in Mississippi. However, Sturges' gifts for dialogue and characterization are evident and Stahl's straightforward sincerity is not a bad match with his more wry cohort. Slightly Dishonorable is an old fashioned diversion, but the talents of Sturges and Stahl do much to banish the smell of moth balls.