Money Means Nothing

This Monogram drama from 1934 is from the period when they were still trying to make good movies, before they focused on cheap second features. It has a good script, a fine supporting cast, including Edgar Kennedy, who gets to do one of his patented slow burns, and Maidel Turner, who is excellent as a well meaning, gossipy neighbor. Wallace Ford is also good in the lead. Unhappily, Gloria Shea, as the female lead, is not up to the standards of the rest of the cast, which also includes Betty Blythe and Vivien Oakland, but the material is good enough to support her.

Christy Cabanne was on a bit of a roll during this period, working with small budgets but getting good casts, and here he gets to play some tricks with the camera-work. Early, character-setting scenes are shot with a highly mobile camera that swoops gracefully through the world of the rich, but it stops dead in its tracks once Ford and Shea are married and living in poverty in Brooklyn. The effect is beautifully calculated to keep the audience in a state of low-level anxiety, a trick of the camera that was discovered during the silent era but rarely used in the sound era. I can think of only a few cases, such as Kurosawa's HIGH AND LOW and Sturges' THE GREAT ESCAPE that use this method.

Cabanne is often denigrated as the least of D.W. Griffith's disciples, but he managed to keep directing until his death, usually second features with small budgets. I think the low esteem he is held in is undeserved and hope that people who care about movies will give him a chance.