Sadie McKee

I can’t do a separate review for this film because it’s not good enough and it’s not bad enough.

In the badly-titled 1937 film, Mannequin, (there's one good modeling scene, but that's it regarding a "mannequin") Joan Crawford and Spencer Tracy team up for their one and only time.

I have to admit, this is a pretty good piece of drama for about 7/8ths of the film. Crawford plays Jesside Cassidy, a girl determined to make it out of the tenement houses of New York’s Hester Street.

In an act of desperation, she marries Eddie Miller (Alan Curtis) who seems to be a nice enough guy. He has ambition and Jessie sees him as a way out and a way up. One of the major flaws of the film is how it cheats on this character. Twenty minutes into it we learn that Eddie is a real low-life. He’s a boxing promoter who has just lost his meal ticket fighter in a crap game.

This comes out of nowhere. We then must just suppose that Jessie is as blind as a bat in regards to recognizing character issues of men or that the film simply McGuffined Eddie into a bad character overnight to artificially drive the plot.

During their marriage celebration dinner both Eddie and Jessie run into millionaire John Hennessey (Spencer Tracy). Hennessey is immediately smitten by Jessie and sends a bottle of champagne to their table. They dance. Some sparks fly (mostly on the side of Hennessey). But the groundwork is laid.

Eddie knows that Hennessey is a big shot (he had insisted his new wife dance with him). She throws Jessie at him further, insisting that she go to one of Hennessey’s parties by herself. He knows Hennessey has an eye for her and wants to use this as an in. Jessie and Hennessey have a nice scene on his balcony overlooking the city.

Later Eddie goes total bum and finds himself in jail. Jessie needs to find $100 to bail him out. She goes to Hennessey who hands over the money, no questions asked. Eventually one thing leads to another. Eddie becomes such a bum (including trying to hatch a scheme whereby Jessie marries Hennessey to get a hook into his money for the both of them) that Jessie divorces him.

Naturally one thing leads to another again and Hennessey and Jessie find themselves to be a couple and get married. She doesn’t love him (an aspect barely explored) and apparently he knows she doesn’t love him. But they take off on a world tour and by the time they reach Hennessey’s ancestral home in Ireland, Jessie is madly in love with him.

And all this is pretty good stuff. Tracy is terrific in this. Where it goes wrong is the blackmail plot by Eddie. He means to blackmail his ex-wife. He’ll tell Hennessey about his (not her) old plot to marry her (only temporarily) to Hennessey for his money.

And this is where the movie comes completely off the rails. There really is no leverage to Eddie’s blackmail. All she needs do is tell Jessie about what Eddie had proposed a long time ago — the very reason she divorced him. But we’re supposed to believe that Hennessey will simply assume that Jessie has been a gold-digger all this time. And this aspect falls completely flat and ruins an otherwise good movie.

It’s funny because there is generally good chemistry between Tracy and Crawford. One wonders why they didn’t do another film together. And this film is full of splendid scenes.



And for the moment, this completes the Joan Crawford retrospective although there is one more I have in the queue that I might watch soon.

Hennessey pursued her even on the day of her wedding to Eddie, so the “gold-digger” aspect should be completely unbelievable by anyone involved. You make some good points. Also, what I hadn’t yet mentioned was her noble resolution to this if Eddie did try blackmail. She told Eddie that she would leave Hennessey. And, indeed, part of the botched ending was that she suddenly (after a happy-filled montage of them traveling the world) suddenly (having learned that Eddie was getting ready to blackmail her) told Hennessey that, well, I’m just bored in the marriage and I don’t really love you after all.

I mean, I do think at times, Timothy, that these movies are written just to annoy me. Like I said, this is a pretty good one throughout most of it with some terrific scenes and characters. The talk between Jessie and her mother while they are both washing dishes is priceless. Great dialogue. Great themes.

And so this makes the flame-out all the more difficult to handle. Had this been a mediocre film from the start, the ending would have just been par for the course, lukewarm slop ladled onto lukewarm slop. There would be no shock value, no cinematic whiplash. But this was overall pretty good. But it’s like taking a sightseeing trip to the Grand Canyon, with beautiful weather and wonderful sites along the way. But you pull into the Grand Canyon viewing point parking lot, the brakes having leaked all their fluid somewhere back in Tallahassee, and you go over the edge. But what a nice trip up to that point.

In the 30s Hester St. in NYC was almost an exclusively Jewish area. So it is likely she was 2nd generation  Jewish, her mother was Jewish, and her father was Scott,  something that it appears the movie doesn't cover.