Min & Bill

Another fable with a moral tonight.  And just a gender switch on “High Noon”.

Marie Dressler was Oscar’s 1930 “Best Actress” for this role.  Like the “High Noon” plot with a target community, Marie gave her all for her adopted daughter; wound up winning a fight by gunshot to save the child from knowing the truth about her birth mother.

The unpretentious days of Hollywood

This was a transitional film to the talkies.

 It featured two of the ugliest Hollywood stars to receive Academy awards.

  Not only ugly, but coarse and guttural, but also the most human of any actors on the screen.  They got across pure human emotion.

Wallace Beery and Marie D. were common people in all their roles.  In this one, a commercial fisherman and a waterfront bar-owner.  The real mom comes back drunk and whorish after 14 years; Min sends her away, using her life’s savings.  Bill is an inept, but steady boyfriend.  The girl looks to be on a path to success, but the birth mom “wants her share”.

Marie D. looks mad and angry for the entire length of the movie, she's scary.

The only one smile on her face was at the end, when the police arrested her, for shooting the rotten true birth mother of her child; and protecting that child from knowing her true mother.  Marie had done her family good.

 

Wallace Beery was a moral compass in my youth, as was Gary Cooper in High Noon.  Beery kept me humble – common sense knowledge between right and wrong – earthiness.  He was in this picture to keep Min from going too far with her anger, and to save her when she’d ignored him and gone too far. 

 

A few years later Marie D. became famous by a film line that many in my generation remembered.  It was from Dinner at Eight, between her and Jean Harlow, who had just mentioned a (book?) she had read,

J.H. – “Do you know that the guy says that machinery is going to take the place of every profession?"

M.D. - "Oh, my dear, that's something you need never worry about."

 

It also hasn’t passed my attention that the next year’s Best Actress was Helen Hayes with a similar plot line about complete sacrifice for a child.