The Devil to Pay

Ronald Colman and Loretta Young

George Fitzmaurice's The Devil to Pay, from 1930, is a fun pre-Code romantic drama with lots of droll comedy. Ronald Colman plays Willie Hale, a prodigal son of an English aristocrat. Hale is a suave bounder with a common touch, a perfect fit for Colman who had worked with Fitzmaurice earlier on the hit Raffles. We first meet Hale in Kenya where he is charmingly auctioning off his possessions in order to buy a ticket back to Blighty. There, his father, an excellent Frederick Kerr, makes at token stab at remonstrating his feckless issue, but ends up indulging him. His sister introduces him to Dorothy Hope, played by the seventeen year old Loretta Young, already a seasoned film veteran, who is engaged to a shifty white Russian. However, Dorothy becomes so smitten with Hale that she dumps her Russian and is affianced to Hale with twenty four hours. 

As for the rest of the film, I remember how my father summed up, phallocentricly, the plots of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas to me when I was a child: boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. The reason I bring up operettas is that was the background of the primary screenwriter of the film, Frederick Lonsdale, who authored the librettos for such forgotten bon-bons as King of Cadonia, The Balkan Princess, and The Maid of the Mountains. He had shifted in the 1920s to penning drawing room comedies, the most famous being On Approval, and this is the genre that The Devil to Pay resides in. Happily, director Fitzmaurice presents the action fluidly and elegantly. This is yet another early talkie that punctures the myth of that era being dominated by static and clunky fare. The film is filled with pans and dollies that are both elegant and dynamic. My favorite is a dolly shot of a passel of lonely dogs imprisoned in the display window of a pet shop. Our hero can't help but go ahead and purchase one of the incarcerated canines, even though he is down to his last pound. The dolly sets up the scene perfectly, one in which Hale's bona fides as a good egg is made plain to the audience. Colman's rapport with his new pet shows off his continental charm to good effect. 

The sets and costumes are first rate and Fitzmaurice does a good job of conjuring up Britannia upon the sound stages of Santa Monica Boulevard. Even when interior stages are used for exterior sequences, as in the carnival sequence on the fringes of the Derby, enough pixie dust is strewn about to create magical moments. Despite a decided age difference, Colman and Young generate pleasant chemistry. In fact, I don't think I've ever seen Ms. Young look more ravishing. The only negative note I would strike is I think the film under utilizes Myrna Loy. Playing Ms. Young's rival, a showgirl who is having a fling with Hale before he meets Dorothy and then is discarded, Loy is stuck with a hideous blonde bob and little to do; though she does get one nifty risqué moment (see below). All in all, I think William K. Everson summed up the film best as a "charming piece of froth."