Frisco Jenny

This 1932 film, starring Ruth Chatterton in the title role, was essentially a remake of her first big starrer, Madame X (and was more than a bit similar to the oft-remade weepie Stella Dallas)--a woman of disreputable position sacrifices everything for a child. This one begins in San Francisco in 1906. Chatterton's Jenny works in her father's saloon, where girls hustle customers. She's in love with the piano player, but her father is against the union: "I'd rather she marry a Hottentot." Chatterton has a bun in the oven, though (which was possible in a pre-Code picture). But if you know your disaster history you know what's coming, as the Earth shakes and Chatterton's father and sweetheart are killed.

She gives birth to the baby in the cellars of Chinatown, and eventually turns over the child to a rich couple until she gets back on her feet. She does, but decides to let the couple keep the child as their own. Chatterton goes on to become the queen of vice, running prostitution, gambling, and bootlegging operations (there's a great scene where her madams share high tea with her as if they were all society swells). She keeps tabs on her son, who has no idea she is his mother, even when he becomes district attorney and ends up trying her for murder.

As stated, there is almost nothing original about this film, even at its early date. But William A. Wellman does use some interesting tricks to keep a viewer interested. In the early days of sound, many films had a static feel to them, since the microphone had to be secured on set. Wellman bristled at this, and was among the first to use a mobile boom mike to allow his characters to talk and move at the same time. Also, there is a masterful use of whip pans in the trial scenes of the film at the end.

Also, as we will see in future screenings of Wellman films, one of his trademarks was to have key events happen off-screen. For instance, Chatterton asks her boyfriend to let her tell her father of her pregnancy, but he keeps saying no. She leads him out of frame, and it's up to our imagination to wonder what she does, because he says yes (my dirty mind imagines something pretty racy). Then a key moment in the film, when Chatteron's political backer, Louis Calhern, shoots a man, it happens behind an overturned table. When I take a look at Public Enemy this trademark will reappear, as it will in several of Wellman's films.