Learn to Speak

Sunday night, for the very first time, I saw a Joan Crawford movie that I didn't like. Yes, you read that correctly. Even amongst Crawford cinematic stinkers like The Ice Follies of 1939 (Joan and Jimmy Stewart ice skate) and  I Saw What You Did (1965) (Joan's verbal attack on a teenage prank caller is the high point) I have always been able to find moments of Joan joy to make a film worthwhile. But Sunday I stared at my television dumbfounded as I struggled to find a good reason to keep watching the 1930 western Montana Moon.

There are several things I could get snarky about (Cliff "Ukulele Ike" Edwards and Benny Rubin, I am looking at you) but the more I thought about what was wrong with Montana Moon, the more I realized that the problem isn't necessarily the movie, its director, or its actors. The problem is when it was made.

When we talk about the Silent Era turning into the Sound Era, we often imagine a marked delineation between the two. There were silent films before The Jazz Singer (1927) and there were talkies afterwards. But it wasn't that clearcut. Studios scrambled to be technologically ready to produce sound pictures and directors and actors likewise had to figure out how to make movies with audible dialogue- while the sound revolution was happening.

Cameras became much less mobile with soundproofing, so how films were shot and looked underwent a drastic change. Actors (even the ones who had been stage-trained) had to figure out how to speak intimately with the microphone and rely less on gesture and expression so that with natural voices came a more natural acting style. None of these things happened overnight. It took the industry a couple years and many films to consistently make movies that successfully integrated sound into filmmaking and acting. Montana is one of those early sound experiments.

Montana is the story of Joan, a well-heeled flapper (Crawford, of course) who on a trip to the West with a trainful of cityfolk falls in love with a cowboy (Alabama halfback turned Hollywood leading man Johnny Mack Brown) and proceeds to commit matrimony.

But can this marriage of city and country survive tuxedos, ten gallon hats,and tangos? The plot is silly and musical numbers are squeezed in to capitalize on sound creating the first singing cowboy picture- a tradition that would later give us the likes of Roy Rogers. The look of Montana is not particularly Ford-esque with little imaginative use of the wide open vistas of Montana. Shots are fairly static and seem anchored to the minimal range of the microphone. And the acting? Well...

Crawford received top-billing for Montana because she had earned it in silent hits like Our Dancing Daughters (1928) but Montana was technically only her second sound picture. (You could count Hollywood Revue of 1929 but she doesn't really act in that. She just does the Charleston while singing "Got a Feeling for You.")

Crawford often told the story of the first time she first heard a recording of her voice. "That's not me. That's a man." So I was a little surprised to hear her voice in Montana was a higher pitch than we are used to. Crawford's type at the time was the young, carefree flapper, so it's likely that she maintained a youthful sound to match her character. Her acting seems more stiff than her previous energetic silents, with some fist pounding and hand waving filling in for more subtle acting.

But there are moments when we see the confident, future Crawford- her eyes big, her mouth laughing or defiant, her jaw set. Crawford is working out her sound film persona- and in just a year in Possessed she would successfully evolve beyond the flapper to the next stage of her career- the plucky shopgirl who fights her way up from the bottom. By then, her designer for Montana, Adrian, would transform Crawford's look and she would become one of the top box-office draws of the '30's.



So maybe I don't dislike Montana Moon as much as I thought. Just don't make me listen to "Montana Call" again.