Rod La Rocque, you were just born in the wrong century! (THE LOCKED DOOR - 1929)

I've been going nuts with my new DVD recorder, and burning my way through the recent flurry of pre-code Stanwycks on TCM. One maligned but lovely item - THE LOCKED DOOR (1929), one of Babs' first major speaking roles, sticks out not because of her performance, particularly, but because of Rod La Rocque as the requisite debauched, womanizing cad!

The only review I could find of LOCKED online is from Dennis Schwartz who rates it a C:

The melodrama suffers from the static, stage-like look of early sound movies; it was a time when how to use sound was first being developed and still had many kinks to be worked out. Decades later when Stanwyck became a Hollywood legend, she was asked about The Locked Door and quipped: “They never should’ve unlocked the damned thing.”

There's no denying its got its "kinks" but I've got a soft spot a mile deep for these old early creaks and hisses. That crude sound is an ear into a bygone age, far more bygone than just a year or so later, when sound caught up with itself and we could no longer hear the air or marvel at the sopping wet letters and telegrams. LOCKED DOOR is clearly a 'filmed play' and probably originally done on a bi-level trick stage, the kind where actors weaving in and out of closets and unlocked doors to hide from one another. They got that a lot in those days, especially for old dark house mysteries and bed-hopping farce. Here we have a little of both: the old dark art deco-gothic house redecorated as a giant bachelor apartment (danger, maidens!) vs. the spacious pre-war (as in Civil) mansion all stuffed with flowers and marble for multi-generations of family to worry about their honor in. With such a fuss made about who was photographed where and with whom we get a glimpse of a whole way of life that would be eradicated when the boys came home after the Next World War and found outdated morality waiting for them back at their multi-generational homes; they left in droves and moved into prefabricated worlds of the future where they could have sex all the time without small town gossip. The 'burbs, baby! Now you know the whole story. 

In these early sound films however, the importance of outdated, choking morality was still the stuff of woman's pictures, which were huge at the time (I'm reading Thomas Doherty's excellent Pre-Code Hollywood right now, so consider him referenced), and most of the plots revolve around vicious old bats running free-loving hotties out of town--or, if the film is set in the city, avenging the honor of so-and-so's daughter. That's the angle of THE LOCKED DOOR, which has for its centerpiece an extended scene in louche La Roque's swanky bi-level bachelor pad, where the blackmailed Babs goes to retrieve a compromising picture (which Rod holds over her head in exchange for a tryst). See, Stanwyck was once (almost) taken advantage of by La Roque on an "outside the legal limit" party boat (all the rage during Prohibition) and the pair had their picture taken while running off the boat during a police raid (when the boat drifted inside the limit).  The picture includes indications her dress is torn, and she's hiding under Rod's overcoat. But she can explain! 

Our story picks up years later where she's wealthy and married to some taciturn duffer played by the soon-to-be-dead-from-drugs William Boyd. Rod's bought the pic to keep it out of the papers, but figures it may come in handy, when he gets real horny.

Granted, La Rocque may be the villain, but he's hilarious fun, refusing to be pigeonholed into the role of a mere mustache-twirling cad. One can imagine Monroe Owsley or Conrad Nagel in this part being just tedious, but La Rocque will have none of their mewling surliness! No catalogue of sniveling blackmailer signifiers, he! Unabashedly tall and fey, completely at ease in his body and with the then-new trappings of sound - more so than Babs at the time (though she would have the hang of it by 1931's TEN CENTS A DANCE), Rod's having a grand time.

I've never really soaked him up before, but he has a great Vincent Price-meets-Cary Grant macho fey vibe, contrasting his huge rows of teeth and ungainly tallness handled with a dancer's nimble grace and unabashedly feline purr of a voice. Whereas Babs and the rest of the cast seem to be acting out a drawing room drama, hitting their marks and speaking... clearly... and stagey, La Rocque is living his role, and his sexual ease is eye-popping. He's a complex three-dimensional villain, radiating the seductive humor and "owning my own un-okayness" of a man whose love of premarital sex, drinking, and debauchery is very anathema to its stodgy time and--rather than give them up to fit in-- he just gives up all pretense of 'decency' (yet is truly decent when push comes to shove, unlike the more surface decent folks around him, who would rather shoot a man than lose to him). Hell, when the moral code of the time is this repressed, it's almost a true free spirit's sworn duty to buck it, a lesson that prohibition was making clear to everyone).

Also worth noting is Rod's dishy rapport with his old valet (the incomparably named George Bunny), whom he treats as a co-conspiratorial equal rather than a master. A mix of Leporello from DON GIOVANNI and a faux-shocked reprobate uncle in a Phillip Barrie play, Bunny is the icing on the cake!

Proving further Rod has the truest moral code in the whole play/film, the ending has him even clearing all the suspects of his own murder, via death bed statement exonerating the guilty patriarchs around him; it's not that he fancies himself at all a knight, but as if he feels truky sorry for these uptight socialites for whom a whiff of scandal is so horrific that they run around beating people up, waving guns, pleading and hiding corpses, just to avoid a casual sexual hook-up. Better a murder than a quickie for these 'moral' types- and that is punishment enough for them. In this liberated, loosey-goosey attitude, Rod all but screams "Jesus, maybe y'all wouldn't have had to shoot me if you would all just get laid once in awhile and shut up about it!" 

Amen, Rod, that's real morality, and in just a 40 years or so you'd be a man of your time.

Rod (in bed, where else), looking and acting ten feet tall.