NitrateVille.com

Frank Borzage's BAD GIRL (1931) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Girl_(1931_film) has got to be the least famous film from the classic era to have won major Oscars (for Best Director and for Writing). It is on Blu-ray and was in that mammoth dvd box set of Borzage and Murnau released a decade ago. Has anyone seen it? I'm guessing the combo of "B" level stars and being a early 30's Fox film are the main reasons it's been so seldom screened.

I've seen and think highly of it. I'm sort of a James Dunn devotee, so I'm biased, but his feature debut was very, very well-received at the time. The scene in the doctor's office where he breaks down crying, begging for the doctor to help his pregnant wife, took some guts -- not every actor could have, or would have wanted to, appear so emotionally naked in their first movie, but Borzage guided him well, as he did for Sally Eilers. It's not quite as serious of a film as The Crowd, nor are the characters at the margins as in Borzage's Man's Castle, but Bad Girl has some commonalities with both.

The Dunn-Eilers team never had quite as much acclaim with their subsequent pictures, but they definitely had a following. They scored well in the 1932 Quigley poll of money-making stars -- ahead of Dietrich and Stanwyck. We can only wish that more of their films would get released, or that someone would do a retrospective!

--HA

I wrote about it here for Watch That Movie Night.

I think as a test run for Man's Castle, one of Borzage's best films and one with considerably more magnetic stars (Spencer Tracy and Loretta Young), it pales a little by comparison, but there are certainly good things in it, as well as pre-Code frankness that's not naughty but shockingly matter of fact (an intimation of abortion as an option is truly surprising for the time; same for a clear depiction of post partum depression). Anyway, worth catching if not a forgotten masterpiece.

Here's part of my review of the film:
"This film has many wonderful scenes (Borzage won for best direction this year, and this film won the Oscar for best script) - the opening moments of the story, with Sally Eilers in a bride gown, walking down a stairway has one of the best humorous reveals of any film I've seen from the 1930s. A later scene with a ward of new mothers is stunningly thought out, as Sally in bed, waiting for her infant, studies the other women in the ward, realizing that each woman is taking in this life changing event in her own way: one woman, eyes closed in happiness, another woman singing an Italian lullaby to her child, a third woman with a face filled with fear and uncertainty...Sally has the realization that she is part of something bigger than herself - to paraphrase John Dunne, no man, no woman, no child is an island, we are all part of a larger and more mysterious whole."

Harlowgold wrote: ↑

Thu Mar 07, 2019 6:09 pm

Frank Borzage's BAD GIRL (1931) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Girl_(1931_film) has got to be the least famous film from the classic era to have won major Oscars (for Best Director and for Writing). It is on Blu-ray and was in that mammoth dvd box set of Borzage and Murnau released a decade ago. Has anyone seen it? I'm guessing the combo of "B" level stars and being a early 30's Fox film are the main reasons it's been so seldom screened.

I wrote about BAD GIRL on November 3, 2017. If you enter 'Borzage', 'Eilers' and 'Dunn' as keywords, you'll find it.

earlytalkiebuffRob wrote: ↑

Sun Mar 10, 2019 3:49 pm

Harlowgold wrote: ↑

Thu Mar 07, 2019 6:09 pm

Frank Borzage's BAD GIRL (1931) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Girl_(1931_film) has got to be the least famous film from the classic era to have won major Oscars (for Best Director and for Writing). It is on Blu-ray and was in that mammoth dvd box set of Borzage and Murnau released a decade ago. Has anyone seen it? I'm guessing the combo of "B" level stars and being a early 30's Fox film are the main reasons it's been so seldom screened.

I wrote about BAD GIRL on November 3, 2017. If you enter 'Borzage', 'Eilers' and 'Dunn' as keywords, you'll find it.

I did try to search for comments about Borzage and "Bad Girl" here alas, it pulls up some 800+ posts. Love this site but the search engines sometimes are too generalized when trying to find older comments.

It's tough, I know. You can use Google search to search only this site by going to it and typing in something like "borzage bad girl site:nitrateville.com." (Be sure to omit the space between site and the URL you want to search.

The other trick is to think of a word that will likely show up in that thread and in relatively few others, as Earlytalkiebuffrob suggests; "Eilers" alone turns up just 102 and "Eilers Dunn" 26.

You need to use quotation marks to search for a phrase and narrow from there: site:nitrateville.com "bad girl"
Works for most search engines.