The Lady of Scandal (1930) Review, with Ruth Chatterton

Starring: Ruth Chatterton, Basil Rathbone, and Ralph Forbes
Directed by: Sidney Franklin
Released by: MGM
Runtime: 76 minutes
Release date: May 24, 1930

Availability

Produced by MGM, the copyright for this movie now belongs to Warner Bros. Their Warner Archive specialty label has released it on DVD. Purchase it from Amazon here.

Streaming Availability

If this title is streaming online, services are displayed here. Powered by JustWatch

Proof That It’s Pre-Code

A big old drunk gent is singing in the bathtub until his wife loses her temper, walks in, and throws a goblet of gin thrown at him.

Lady of Scandal: Freaking the Normies

“I was conceited enough to believe that when you met me… well, I was wrong. I rather feel like a servant girl applying for this position.”

Ruth Chatterton has her charms, a glowing spark on the screen amongst a lot of damp kindling. In her future were a handful of excellent pre-Codes, including Frisco Jenny, Lilly Turner, and Female, but this is 1930 and The Lady of Scandal seems to be about as best as we can manage.

Chatterton plays Elsie, a popular stage star newly engaged to the wealthy scion, John (Forbes), of an old aristocratic British family. His family objects, so he takes her out to their estate to meet them face-to-face. They’re mostly fuddy duds, save for Edward (Rathbone), a roustabout whose scandalous front-page affair with a married woman also has him on the outs with everyone. As John’s family bickers and complains about Chatterton’s desire to join “natural leaders of this country”, they devise a way to be rid of her: she will stay at the house for six months so she can see how they live and breathe firsthand, hoping their stuffy ways will suffocate the outsider.

But that’s not how this works. It’s another case of the seductions of the jazzy American future against the stodgy British aristocratic class. Get with the times, grandpa! Now we drink cocktails and dance to jazz and… play tennis and… well, one guy has an affair with a married woman, but if you know all the details of the case, his actions are really quite sympathetic, and… look, it’s the future, man.

The Brits garumph and grumble before realizing there are worse things than their butler mixing some cocktails by the tray-full, but, unfortunately for Elsie, over the course of her first three weeks, ends up falling for Edward. Edward falls for her, too, if it weren’t for his commitment to that married and a lot of other convoluted junk that gets us to the inevitable downbeat ending; class and name are nothing, but honor is what’s important.

Or something. The Lady of Scandal is barely surprising in a lot of ways. It bears repeating in almost all of my reviews of movies released in 1930, the technology of making sound pictures is still shaky. Awkward beats, long deadening shots litter the film. Like this medium shot of three people talking? Enjoy two solid minutes of it.

Accepting these limitations, The Lady of Scandal is fine enough. There’s a closeup of Chatterton’s knees jittering as she loses patience with being trapped in a house of the living dead. Later in the movie, Ralph Forbes, after a sleepless night, stumbles upon a rainy veranda where he finds Chatterton morosely spying the estate. There are nice moments adrift in a lot of tedium that still make it a worthwhile watch for anyone who likes the leading lady.

Trivia, Links and More

Based on the 1927 play The High Road that ran on the West End for 234 performances, as per Wikipedia.

Ruth Chatterton and co-star Ralph Forbes had been married since 1924 and would divorce in 1932. Chatterton would remarry the next day to a different actor, George Brent. One thing I fondly recall from Ruth Chatterton: Actress, Aviator, Author is that Chatterton still kept a picture of Forbes on her bedside table throughout her very short marriage to Brent.

Silver Screen has a nice piece on Chatterton with lots of pictures of her by Dana Rush, “The Unknown Ruth Chatterton.”

The letter shown at the beginning of the movie is dated March 26, 1930, only two months before the film premiered. Considering how quick turnaround times were for films of this time, I have to wonder if it was written contemporaneously.

In another moment of amazing Warner Bros. cross-promotion, one character walks about whistling one of their catalog songs, “You Were Meant for Me.” Eagle-eared listeners will recognize that song from its most famous use in Singin’ in the Rain.