Gregory La Cava’s Bed of Roses was one of the films that inspired me to blog about Hollywood comedies of the ’30s and ’40s. I stumbled on it on TCM. I’d never heard of it before then. I admired My Man Godfrey, so I was interested in La Cava’s other films. Bed of Roses surprised me so much, I felt I needed to ferret around in the archive to see how many neglected gems like it are in there.
La Cava’s reputation nowadays rests mainly on My Man Godfrey, Stage Door and the sublimely odd Gabriel Over the White House. But for my taste, two of his earlier films are better — the wild and woolly The Half-Naked Truth and the criminally neglected Bed of Roses. Oddly, while most of La Cava’s memorable films are set among the well-appointed rich, I think he was much more comfortable telling the stories of sardonic scallywags like W.C. Fields in So’s Your Old Man, Lee Tracy in The Half-Naked Truth, and most of all, Constance Bennett in Bed of Roses.
Few directors suffered more from the Hays Code than La Cava. His pre-code/pre-enforcement comedies are saucy and irreverent, with a lot the ’20s’ fuck-you attitude to bourgeois morality. He was by all accounts a hard drinker, a friend of William Randolph Hearst, and an irrepressible — and affable — creative force on the set. Bed of Roses lacks the visual velvet and containment of My Man Godfrey and 5th Avenue Girl. (Actually, it’s hard to tell because the existing prints are so poor.) It’s basically a happy third middle finger to the Decency League. That said, it’s Constance Bennett’s film. You could probably say that about all of her films. She was a monster star in the late 20s and early 30s, but her significance faded in later years. Testament to that is that I didn’t know who she was before I threw myself into interwar Hollywood films. I knew she was in Topper, but it didn’t register. Suffice it to say, she was a Screen Queen for many years, a major force in Hollywood, and it’s easy to see why. She controlled her set like a flapper Garbo — she made the camera her slave. (And directors, too. She wanted the role that Carole Lombard got in Godfrey; William Powell insisted on Lombard, and La Cava, apparently fatigued by the thespian politics of dealing with Bennett in previous films, was glad to choose Lombard.)
So, as a hello to the so-far ineffectual Hays Code, Bed of Roses opens with what one might call a provocation — a hilarious moon shot. Few films are as brazen at this as Bed. Lorry Evans (Bennett) and Minnie Brown (Pert Kelton) are being processed for release from a Louisiana women’s reformatory, unambiguously because they have been turning tricks. The dialogue — much of it written by La Cava himself — is pretty much between the representatives of The Defenders of Morality vs. Working Girls and Gold Diggers Union. I don’t know for sure, but I doubt there’s any dialogue in any comedy of the time that’s more snappy and witty than this.
Lorry and Minnie finagle their way aboard a Mississippi riverboat headed for New Orleans and quickly find two oafish marks to shake down. The girls’ patter is pure sarcastic poetry.
MINNIE: You’ll like Smitty. He’s a big cotton man.
LORRY: Yeah, he looks perfectly normal to me.
SMITTY: You are some kidder.
LORRY: Have you got a lot of cotton ranches or does it grow on animals?
SMITTY: Well, not exactly. You see, we’re in a different branch of the business.
We are Boll-Weevil exterminators.
LORRY: Don’t look at me. I ain’t done nothing.
…
LORRY: If you want any more you’ll have to wring it out of him to get it.
MINNIE: He looks wrung out now. Why didn’t he eat the bottle?
LORRY: You’d better take Mr boll-weevil out of here before he eats the cotton blanket.
Discovering that Smitty’s wallet has been pilfered, Smitty’s fellow weevil-exterminator brings the ship’s captain to mete out justice, but Lorry won’t be meted on — she leaps into the river. The night is so foggy that she vanishes into the mist. Luckily for everyone, she’s pulled out by the captain of a passing cotton barge, Dan (Joel McCrea at his studly peak).
After some silly mutual dunking, Dan gives Lorry a change of clothes and his bunk to sleep in, while he beds down on deck. Bennett and McCrea made four films together (Bed was the last of them), and the erotic chemistry is palpable. Which brings me to my strange ambivalence about the degraded quality of the print. The film is steamy! The visual parallels of the river fog — it’s south Louisiana, so that fog is basically steam — and the steam that Lorry and Dan make is a sensuous trope. I do wish I could see how all this appeared on the silver screen, but the blur of the neglected print is so fortuitously right that I’m not sure I would prefer a clearer one. Dan thinks he sees through Lorry’s cynical facade — he’s no innocent, but Lorry has him fooled. She absconds with his payroll money as soon as they dock in New Orleans. Dan doesn’t see straight, as far as Lorry is concerned. (Add to this the real-life dimension that Bennett was woefully nearsighted without her glasses, so she not only exudes an aura of sensual heat and inner-directedness, her eyes actually don’t see clearly. That’s some easy method acting.) At this point, it’s not clear to the audience whether Lorry is turned on by Dan or planning a nefarious strategy — surely both, but we don’t know what the ratio is. Not just the audience — Dan doesn’t know, either. And it’s a good bet that Lorry doesn’t, either. Time will tell.
Lorry’s not the type to settle for the skipper of a rundown Mississippi cotton barge, so she uses her ill-gotten gains and her memory of observing a rich high-class publisher, Steven Page (John Halliday), on the riverboat, to turn a different kind of trick (well, not that different). She impersonates a magazine reporter intent on interviewing the big, famous, oh so respectable publishing magnate, playing to his vanity until she gets him as drunk as boll-weevil smiting Smitty, and secures her compromised position, with the comforts it affords.
La Cava makes a striking move in the interview scene. Lorry appears as the spitting image of Miriam Hopkins’s Lily in Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise, made the previous year, as she pretends to be Gaston’s secretary. Don’t tell me the resemblance is accidental. It’s a surprising meta-moment — is it a parody? an homage? both? I haven’t seen any discussions about it (there’s almost no commentary on Bed of Roses) but once you see it, you can’t ignore it. Bed is La Cava’s wry, gender- and class-inverted American response to Lubitsch. The silky smooth thief is now a gorgeous gold digger, a hooker rather than an elegant cat burglar; the mark she’s embedded herself with is a victim, like guys are. And in the end, she’ll discover that what she really wants isn’t the high-life pilfered from the stupid rich, but a working-class hunk honestly (eventually) acquired. And while Trouble opens with a garbage-scow gondola in Venice that is immediately forgotten, Bed replaces it with a rundown barge on the Mississippi that embodies lasting bonheur. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Now feeling secure in her kepthood, Lorry returns to Dan to hand back the stolen money and make amends. Dan is generous and forgiving about it. What a guy! It’s that steam again. Lorry claims she has a new job as a “governess.” Dan would like to see her. Now Lorry is in a bind — satin sheets or a cotton barge?
Mae West is the tutelary deity of our streetwise mommas — but Lorry has too much flex to have only one attitude. It’s Minnie that’s Mae West’s accomplished disciple. She has old-school gold-digger advice for Lorry. (Note the funny montage at the end of the scene — sound on image — as Lorry ponders and a boat horn sounds.)
Lorry returns to Dan’s barge to have some cake, and she gets it — beefcake, that is — in a nice display of McCrae’s endowments. More steam. Dan wants to press his advantage.
DAN: I’ve got another treat for you.
LORRY: What is it?
DAN: I’m going to let you watch me shave.
LORRY: You’re too good to me.
La Cava doesn’t have a “touch” exactly, as Lubitsch and Hawks did, but his sense of pacing is wonderful. Note the way Dan makes Lorry wait for her treat.
Dan takes Lorry up to the deck to stargaze, and they flow into what I consider one of the best romantic scenes in the romcoms of the era. The stars shine brightly, but the steam is still evident. Maybe it’s that print again. Dan proposes in his way, and beswooned Lorry naturally asks, “proposing what?” The dialogue in Bed of Roses ranks among the best of the comedies of the period — up there with anything that Wilder and Brackett or Rafaelson and Lubitsch did. Its brilliance is natural and unforced, as the two lovers seal the deal in the kind of clinch you usually only see in star-crossed melodramas. It’s a stone mystery to me why the film is not admired more.
The whole scene is gorgeous to behold.
That should be more than enough but there’s more. In a scene that could have been performed by Bette Davis in a weepie, Lorry arranges to move out as Steven’s mistress and begin again. Hollywood loved to intensify its romcoms with the frisson of sacrificial melodrama, and La Cava plays that hand to the hilt.
Lorry goes straight. She finally knows shame. After leaving Steven, she moves into a one-room flat and gets a job clerking in a department store. Steven wants her back badly enough to make a deal with Minnie to trick Lorry into a meeting at a Mardi Gras masquerade ball. There, she turns down his big offer once and for all, resigning herself to a life that’s honest but bereft of her great love, considering herself unworthy of the big lug. But who should appear at her door but Dan, who knows all, understands all, and persuades her that her place is on the cotton barge going up the river — in a more literal way than how she was introduced. The ending is a bit hasty considering the languor of the body of the film, but it will do. It was the steam we wanted anyway.
Bed of Roses isn’t just a neglected gem — it’s one of the most brilliant of them.