Lady of the Night (1925)

Director: Monta Bell
Writer: Adela Rogers St. Johns and Alice D. G. Miller
Stars: Norma Shearer, Malcolm Mac Gregor and George K. Arthur

I wasn’t expecting to like Lady of the Night as much as I did, especially as I had seen it before and didn’t rate it highly back in 2006. I’ve also never been a huge fan of Norma Shearer, who was the biggest female star at MGM back then, only partly because she was married to Irving Thalberg, their head of production.

However, she’s highly impressive here in a double role, as the eighteen year old versions of the two babies we meet at the beginning of the film. One is born poor, her father already in handcuffs as her mother names her Molly; Judge Banning soon sentences him to twenty years. The other is born rich, to the very same judge, her name being Florence.

Shearer delineates these two characters in a number of ways and, while I’m still puzzled as to why nobody who meets both ever chooses to comment that they look stunningly alike, I never confused them once, even though they are actively compared often, including in their very first scenes.

Florence Banning leaves Girls’ Select School with her friends, all kisses and laughter. Life is good for her. In the next scene, Molly Helmer graduates from Girls’ Reform School, with the title card adding that she’s now an orphan. It’s not a bright future that she’s facing and she’s hardly looking forward to it.

The next scenes see them both dancing, the well to do young lady in society circles with a selection of very polite young gentlemen, but her counterpart on a crowded dancefloor over at Jimmy Kelly’s Palais de Dance. It’s isn’t said outright that she and her friends work as taxi dancers, but it seems rather likely. IMDb calls her “a world-weary prostitute” and that never comes up either. Frankly, I don’t see it, but I’m willing to accept that they’re taxi dancers.

Rather surprisingly, we’re not really given a lot of background at all. We know the status of Molly and Florence’s families but that’s about all. We don’t know their parents’ names, only that Florence’s father is a judge. We aren’t told what Molly’s father was sentenced for or even whether he did it or not. And, surprisingly, it’s not revisited at the end where we might think the plot would have wrapped it all up neatly.

Instead we’re given David Page, with whom both girls fall in love. He’s played by Malcolm McGregor, whose roles dried up when movies moved to sound. Presumably his voice wasn’t a good match to his looks.

Initially, Molly is with “Chunky” Dunn, who is about as appealing as his name, but not for the reason you think. Somehow he thinks that he’s “a prince of fashion” but he’s just a wuss who presumably does something on the edges of the underworld. When someone who likes the look of his girl steps in and firmly pushes him over with one hand, leaving Molly to kick his shins to pieces, it falls to his friend Dave to knock the interloper out.

And suddenly, Molly is all about David. She doesn’t initially seem to be sincere, just lustful of his manliness, but she also starts to dream a lot about respectability. He’s an inventor and he comes up with, of all things, a tool that will get into any safe on the planet. Chunky knows some crooks who would buy it but Molly tells him not to go crooked. Sell it to banks instead.

Florence isn’t with anybody, though she’s in the mood to find someone, given her reaction to Sally sneaking off to the “cosy corner” with Sam at one of the posh dances. Of course, the bank directors who buy into David’s invention include a certain Judge Banning, so she meets David and they both promptly fall in love.

So it’s a love triangle, hardly surprising for a weepy romantic drama, but where both of the women in that triangle are played by the same actress. David is certainly oblivious to the fact that Molly loves him but how he is oblivious to the fact that both these girls look alike?

Are we supposed to put that down to Norma Shearer’s acting? Certainly she doesn’t simply use wardrobe and make-up to delineate these two characters. She changes their demeanour, one happy and the other sad, one elegant and the other slouching and always chewing gum. Also, Florence is often still, following etiquette and doing only what a young lady should, but Molly is always in motion, as if she has to be quick on her feet at all times.

It’s a superb display of acting, but it doesn’t hide the fact that they look alike. David simply doesn’t notice and we’re supposed to buy into that. In fact, he doesn’t even notice when they finally meet—and that’s no spoiler, because it was always doomed to happen. The plot serves to build us up to that moment, whether you’re a fan of women’s pictures or not. Just in case you aren’t, I won’t spoil what happens during and after that scene, but no female member of the audience in 1925 would have found it at all surprising or shocking. To be fair, it’s not too likely that they were looking to be surprised. This plays deliberately to formula.

I should point out here, though, that, while Norma Shearer was the biggest female star at MGM in 1925, she’s not the biggest name here to posterity. Debuting on call sheets under her real name of Lucille LeSueur is Joan Crawford, though she’s only in a couple of scenes, shown from behind, as an uncredited body double. I presume that’s her as Frances looking at Molly as she walks in on her in David’s workshop. I’d expect that’s her as both Molly and Frances in the following scene outside in the latter’s car.

Of course, nobody at the time had any idea who Lucille LeSueur was and the point of her being there is that we don’t see her face. She’d act in a few more pictures, mostly uncredited, before MGM’s head of publicity set up a Name the Star contest in Movie Weekly to decide on a stage name for her.

So I liked this more than I did the first time I saw it. Partly that’s because I’m starting to get a better appreciation of what Norma Shearer did. Of the dozen or so movies I’ve seen her in, both silent and sound, this isn’t close to being my favourite but it surely has to mark her best performance. She gives a masterclass on how to play a pair of different characters in a pair of different ways.

The only other aspect worthy of mention is the cinematography by Andre Barletier. Much of it is routine but there are some superb shots in far from pivotal moments. One that struck me particularly was as Molly’s father leaves in the custody of a policeman; his final glance at her is through banisters that look rather like prison bars, signalling that he’s going down in more than one sense.

Next time, I guess I’ll focus more on that.