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Lady Of The Pavements

1929, Movie, NR, 93 mins

Lady Of The Pavements: Review

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As an ordinary programmer and part talkie, this relatively light drama isn't bad. Velez, later to become famous as "the Mexican Spitfire" in the 1930s and 1940s, is paired off with Boyd, an actor discovered by Cecil B. DeMille, who later was to become the western's Hopalong Cassidy. The setting for this Ruritanian romance is Paris, 1868. As a Prussian count, Boyd is engaged to Goudal, a French countess. She enrages the man after engaging in an affair, so he vows to marry a "lady of the pavements." Goudal secretly arranges for Boyd to meet Velez, a cabaret singer whom she disguises as a sophisticate. The two marry, then a reception is held in their honor. There Goudal reveals Velez's true identity, and the frightened singer rushes out, returning to her old cabaret to resume singing. However, Boyd is in love and finds Velez for the happy conclusion. For any minor director, this would probably be considered a fairly good outing. The reviews were generally good, and Velez gives the part real zest. However, the director in this case was the great D.W. Griffith. Though the camera work shows some occasional flashes of his old touch, this represents both a personal and artistic failure. By now his career was well out of his control, ravaged by his genteel Southern ideals which were long out of date, as well as an unhappy problem with alcohol. Critics paid more attention to the film's fiery leading lady, complimenting her on the live performance she gave at the film's opening wherein she did impersonations of her costar Goudal, as well as Gloria Swanson and Dolores Del Rio. After suffering through the humiliation of the New York opening, Griffith, along with companions Jacob Kalich and Molly Picon, went off for a private party of their own. At the end of the evening's drinking, the beaten man, in a hazy depression perhaps increased by his alcoholic consumption, signed Picon's autograph book with the bitterness only fallen genius knows: "There is no more--D.W." There were some inventive techniques employed by the great Griffith, however. In one startling scene Griffith wanted to show the image of Boyd repeated 13 times, a multiple exposure filling an entire room, then merging into one image. Four special effects specialists were hired to achieve this image but they failed. Then Ned Mann created the scene by exposing the negative through the camera 36 times. Griffith also experimented with Velez as she sang a song, increasing the sound of her voice as she approached the camera and decreasing it as she retreated, almost employing the camera here as the subjective camera, as a character, or as one might really hear another person, but technicians failed to get the right sound in this early day talkie wherein synchronization was a crude and fumbling technique. leave a comment
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