ALICE WHITE & JOCELYN LEE in BROADWAY BABIES (First National, 1929)

                               

fig. 1 Alice White and Chas Delaney

Broadway Babies is the story of three women. No, not the three girls of the title played by Alice White, Marion Byron and Sally Eilers. In fact, although billed just below Miss White, Byron and Eilers have really little to do other than provide pulchritude appeal. No, the interesting women are Miss White, motherly character actress Bodil Rosing, and junior league femme fatale Jocelyn Lee. Alice, you see, is all set to follow her greed rather than her heart and ditch her poor boyfriend Charles Delaney in favor of gambler Fred Kohler. And she is supported by Miss Rosing who, to her regret, had followed her heart instead of her head and gone from vaudeville stardom to performing menial backstage work. Miss Lee, meanwhile, goes after every man in sight, more of less indiscriminately. Alice at one point calls her "a big hunk of baloney."

All of this comes to us from faraway 1929 which was supposedly a time where actors were standing still better to  e n u n c i a t e  into flower pots. Nothing could be further from the truth regarding Babies, which constantly moves. No, what sinks this backstage movie - and, to be frank, the reputation of Alice White along with it - are production numbers featuring singers who can't really sing and dancers who can't dance. A common complaint at the time and the main reason why backstage musicals took such a hit at the box offices around 1930 that most were sold as dramas instead. 

                                  

fig. 2 Alice White

A former secretary for, of all people, Teutonic auteur Josef Von Sternberg, Alice White (1904-1983) was heavily promoted in this and several other backstage musicals by director Mervyn LeRoy who clearly saw in her another Clara Bow. But like Clara herself, Alice became somewhat grating in sound films and her time in the sun proved brief.

Not so brief, however, than Jocelyn Lee (1902-1980), the villainess of Broadway Babies, who enjoyed a 1926-1933 screen career but was much better known for marrying and quickly divorcing movie directors Henry "Pathe" Lehrman and Luther Reed. (In the case of Lehrman, Jocelyn followed in the footsteps of one Virginia Rappe, whose death after a wild Labor Day party in 1921 became a cause célèbre still discussed today.) Neither of Lee's divorces was done in quiet and she even faced an arrest warrant after physically attacking Reed. A third union, to movie executive James Seymour apparently quieted her down but by then her career was running purely on fumes.

Née Mary Alice Simpson and hailing from Chicago, Jocelyn Lee had trod the boards as a chorus girl with the "George White Scandals" and the "Follies" before embarking on a screen career playing mostly chorus girls and minor Bad Girls. I wish I could say that her performance in Babies was memorable but, alas, her quick fade from Hollywood is quite understandable.     

                                                         

VIOLET DUNN & THE BLACK CAMEL (Fox, 1931)

Violet Dunn gained fame as one of the featured dancers in Philip Dunning & George Abbott's "Broadway," a substantial hit that racked up more than 600 performances 1926-'28. The illustration, courtesy of New York Public Library's Billy Rose Collection, is a 1929 Arent Cigarette Card actually promoting Miss Dunn's performance. 

There is no doubt in my mind that this Violet Dunn is indeed the Violet Dunn that enjoyed a brief, two movie Hollywood career for Fox in 1931, appearing in Doctor's Wives, starring Warner Baxter, and The Black Camel, the second Warner Oland Charlie Chan movie and the first to have survived.

                                           

SPOILER ALERT!!!

Yes, indeed: Violet Dunn, who plays movie star Dorothy Revier's maid in a most seething manner, turns out the be the culprit of one of the story's two killings. (The other murder is committed by none other than Dwight Frye, who plays the butler. Yes, indeed, the butler done it!) Miss Dunn, you see, was actually the widow of an actor who Miss Revier had sort of killed back in the day and her vengeful act is at least somewhat plausible. The means to commit said murder and old Charlie's deducing are pure pulp fiction, however. And that is as it should be.

This Viola Dunn, who on the cigarette card is listed as "American," is nevertheless most likely the Canadian-born actress who went on to some legitimate stage success replacing Glenda Farrell in the 1970 Broadway hit "Forty Carats."

Valeska Suratt: the poor man's Theda Bara

Surviving portraits of silent screen vamp Valeska Suratt usually depict a zaftig woman wearing outrageous outfits but recently I came across one that actually show a handsome woman if a bit long in the tooth to be portraying man eaters. 

                             

I actually have a sentimental fondness for Madame Suratt although none of her films seems to have survived: of all the bios I submitted while employed by the All Movie Guide, more than 2000, this one brought me the greatest headache. For reasons known only to the powers-at-be at AMG, while the on site editors left movie reviews pretty much alone they just couldn't help meddling with personal bios. Not by catching misspellings, mind you, or grammatical errors, which certainly would have been welcomed, but by changing words apparently just, well, because they could. I finally put my foot down, figuratively speaking, when Valeska Suratt came out as a completely garbled mess complete with non sequiturs and, yes, misspellings. I demanded that my byline be removed, end of story. The senior editor agreed, and, lo and behold, they kept their grubby little paws off my work for the duration. Below is the published version of my Suratt bio. Still not word perfect but close enough.

"Ridiculous looking by modern standards, silent screen femme fatale Valeska Suratt arrived with some fanfare in 1915 as producer Jesse J. Lasky's The Immigrant. An obvious imitator of Theda Bara, Surratt (who actually hailed from Terre Haute, IN) was quickly corralled by Bara's employer William Fox. Although this suggests a move to keep Bara in line, it may have been an effort to corner the vamp market altogether. After all, Fox also had the equally devastating Virginia Pearson in his stable. Suratt did her bodice-ripping best in films with titles such as The Siren and The Slave (both 1917), but the vamp craze was already waning and there was really only one Bara anyway. Suratt later claimed to have written a screenplay about Mary Magdalene which she misguidedly handed over to Will H. Hays, of the notorious Hays Code. Hays, Suratt stated, passed it on to director Cecil B. DeMille, who of course would go on to create The King of Kings (1927), featuring Jacqueline Logan as the biblical femme fatale. When no royalties were forthcoming, Suratt sued Hays, DeMille, and screenwriter Jeanie MacPherson. She lost, left show business altogether, and reportedly, later became something of a religious zealot and a recluse."