Ann Dvorak was riding high in 1932. The actress with the smooth voice and bright eyes had paid her dues as a chorus girl and assistant choreographer at MGM when director George Raft cast her as Cesca Camonte, sister (and object of desire) of the gangster lead in Scarface (1932). That star-making turn led to lots of screen work, culminating in her triumphant turn as the doomed drug addict Vivian in Three on a Match (1932), the role for which she is best remembered today. The broad rural comedy Stranger in Town was one of the smaller pictures she made in 1932, but it's worth watching for a glimpse of Dvorak in her ingenue prime.

Adapted from co-screenwriter Carl Erickson's story "Competition", Stranger in Town details how a shrewd general store proprietor Ulysses Crickle (Charles "Chic" Sale, a vaudeville actor famous for comic hayseed roles) outsmarts the impersonal XYZ Supermarket across the street with some guidance from his classy, college-educated granddaughter Marian (Dvorak). It's big business vs. small town values, with the little guy coming out ahead in what Jack Warner described as an "Americanism story".

Stranger in Town was made in the Pre-Code Era of Hollywood, that brief window between the mainstream advent of sound (1928) and the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code (1934) that guaranteed "no picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it." Films of this era are not only remarkable for their frank treatment of sex and violence, but for the way their female heroines have control over their fate. While Marian is a paragon of virtue as compared to other Pre-Code heroines, she asserts herself in atypical ways, pushing to modernize the old general store as well as choosing to marry the rival store's proprietor (David Manners) for love - even if it infuriates her grandfather.

A unique subgenre of the Pre-Code era is the "preachment yarn"-- movies explicitly addressing social and economic woes of the Great Depression, usually from a progressive point of view. Of all the major studios, Warner Brothers was the most committed to exploring social ills in preachment yarn pictures. Jack Warner was a New Deal Democrat who didn't shy away from overtly politicized films like Cabin in the Cotton (1932), where honest sharecroppers do battle with rich landowners. Similarly, it's the little guys in Stranger in Town - Crickle, Marian, and Crickle's assistant Jed (John Larkin, an African-American actor unmentioned in the opening credits) - who play fair, and the moneyed and powerful who bend the rules.

Director Erle C. Kenton got his start under Mack Sennett as a gag-writer and actor. While his expertise in silent comedy shows in the film's many sight gags, he makes use of new technologies like synchronized sound (the running gag of Crickle's creaky pocket watch) and rear projection, where a filmed background is projected behind actors in a studio to simulate mobile actions like riding in a car.

Stranger in Town wasn't conceived as a vehicle for Dvorak. It's really a showcase for Sale, an actor so well known in his time that his name became slang for an outdoor toilet, since his most famous character was a carpenter of outhouses. But Dvorak's presence as Marian makes sense. She has a knack for exuding glamour in her slim fitted dresses among the rougher country types without appearing remote or excessively urbane, and she finds a way for Marian to articulate the film's moral position without sounding like a scold. Kenton also found ways to bring out her light comic touch, especially in silent gags that leave viewers wondering how she would have fared had her career begun a few years earlier.

The movies Dvorak made in 1932 should have been the beginning of superstardom, but she never achieved the fame of contemporaries like Jean Harlow or Barbara Stanwyck. Instead, she met her first husband Leslie Fenton on the set of The Strange Love of Molly Louvain (1932) and left Hollywood for a year-long honeymoon. (It's easy to imagine why a 19 year old girl who'd made 32 movies in 3 years would want a vacation.) Warner Brothers never forgave her, and salary disputes over Three on a Match only worsened her reputation inside the industry. Stranger in Town is a time capsule of the moment Dvorak was a fresh-faced stranger in the town of Hollywood, on top of her game and on top of the world.

Producer: Lucien Hubbard
Director: Erle C. Kenton
Screenplay: Carl Erickson, Harvey F. Thew
Cinematography: Devereaux Jennings
Editing: James B. Morley
Music: W. Franke Harling
Cast: Charles 'Chic' Sale (Crickle), Ann Dvorak (Marian), David Manners (Jerry), Raymond Hatton (Elmer Perkins), Noah Beery (Hilliker), Maude Eburne (Mrs. Petrick), Lyle Talbot (Brice).
BW-66m.

by Violet LeVoit

Resources:
Doherty, Thomas. Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema; 1930-1934. Columbia University Press. 1999.
www.anndvorak.com