Thoughts on Bed of Roses

   On Criterion, I watched Bed of Roses, a 1933 Pre-Code romantic comedy directed by My Man Godfrey director Gregory La Cava, and co-written by Wanda Tuchock (one of the few women directors to be credited on 1930s Hollywood movies), starring Constance Bennett and Pert Kelton as Lorry and Minnie, a pair of convicts just out of prison in Louisiana who steal and turn tricks to get ahead, often getting men drunk to pick their pockets. The movie is really blatant about their sex work, like Lorry turning down a ride from a priest so that she can drive a delivery truck while Minnie has sex with the driver in back as an exchange of favors. They make it onto a steamboat, without enough money to make it to New Orleans, and Lorry gets caught stealing $60 from a man she manipulated, and she jumps off the boat and swims to a barge led by Dan (a very young Joel McCrea, looking rougher than he would in his more clean-cut Preston Sturges era later), where they banter and fight, and she slowly falls in love with him.

    But she makes it to New Orleans, cons a rich publisher (John Halliday) she had passed by on the steamboat, and after some manipulation and blackmailing him, she gets him to rent her a fancy apartment, and he is essentially her sugar daddy. But Dan comes back into her life, and she has to choose between love or money, including the publisher threatening her back with blackmail about her own sordid past.

    Notably, Mildred Washington, who played Lorry's maid Genevieve, sadly passed away at just 28 the year the movie came out, of complications from appendicitis. She was an actress and dancer, performing in many California clubs, and was one of the stars of Hearts in Dixie, a 1929 movie musical featuring a predominantly Black cast.

    It's a short movie, at just 67 minutes long, and I had thought it started out fun, with two women friends using conning and sex work to get ahead, but it got less interesting when it turned into a story about a woman having to choose between two men, I wasn't as into the romance parts. And I really liked Pert Kelton, she was the typical snappy wise-cracking best friend, and I wanted this to be more of a girl buddy movie. Her as Minnie also gets married, marrying a rich guy out of convenience, though that also felt more like a sugar daddy/sugar baby relationship than being husband and wife.

    It's a decent movie, nice to watch for the pairing of Constance Bennett and Pert Kelton as friends, and seeing a Pre-Code movie that is just barely over an hour long.