Some ThoughtsNo thesaurus is needed to find the best word to describe A Lady’s Morals. ‘Dull’ is the obvious choice.
Grace Moore was the second star of the Metropolitan Opera signed up by MGM but, unlike Lawrence Tibbett, she has no onscreen charisma. In real life–and judging from her enjoyable autobiography–Moore was lively and vivacious, but none of that comes across in her film debut. Her performance is far too weak to carry the picture, and no one knew that better than Moore herself, who wrote scathingly about it.
She is not helped by the fact that the film’s subject, Jenny Lind, lived a stainless and uneventful life, reflected in the fact that the only moment of drama in A Lady’s Morals is a bout of stage fright.
Reginald Denny’s mannered performance aonly adequate support. In his first scenes he seems to be continuing his irritating performance as Bob in Madam Satan; later, he is self-sacrificing. Wallace Beery makes nothing of his brief appearance as P T Barnum, because he is given nothing to do. He was given another, and better, stab at the role in The Mighty Barnum (1934).
Sidney Franklin’s direction and George Barnes’s cinematography are workmanlike, but it is the screenplay that really disappoints. Dorothy Farnum was forced to fictionalize Jenny Lind’s unexciting life, but produces only a hackneyed tale involving blindness brought on by being hit on the head with a bottle.
MGM scored something of a coup by persuading the venerable Carrie Jacobs-Bond to contribute the song ostensibly written by Denny’s character, but otherwise the newly-written score is workaday. This is in contrast to the songs by Donizetti and Bellini. The studio had put a toe in the water of Grand Opera in Call of the Flesh, and continues the experiment here. Further steps were curtailed, however, by the 1932 moratorium.
By all accounts, Jenny Lind (1931), the French remake of A Lady’s Morals, was a better film. Running slightly longer, it was directed by the talented Arthur Robison and playwright Jacques Deval worked on the screenplay.
Leave a Reply