Perhaps it’s just the nature of a seventies/thirties back-to-back watch, but I couldn’t get into this one at all. Brutal for its time, and a great illustration of what we lost with the coming of the Hays Code, but I just couldn’t find my way in.

united states, 1933, english

STEPHEN ROBERTS


The Story of Temple Drake

I didn’t like this film. Well... it’s not quite that simple I suppose. I liked parts of this film and I was bored by most of it. I suspect a large part of that was that I’m no longer used to watching movies in quick succession. This has been a long dry year for movie watching but I managed to watch one yesterday and today, hurrah for me! As a result, I think the tonal shift was probably just too much to overcome.

But anyway. I’ve been dreading this one for a long time, but was finally compelled to give it a chance tonight. I’m not really sure why either those things are true. I suppose I thought it would be upsetting. It wasn’t. I mean, what happened to Temple Drake is certainly upsetting, but the film is so thirties divorced from the realities of what’s happening that it didn’t really hit like that.

Honestly, the best part of the film was the worst part. The beginning is all reasons not to like Temple. She’s a flirt, as if that’s the worst thing in the world. She isn’t good to the guy she “should marry”, as though she owes him anything. She has her local judge grandfather wrapped around her finger. Ok, so she’s kind of spoiled and has terrible taste in men. That’s not really something worthy of all that much scorn.

The middle though. Her actual ordeal. The “story” of the story, as it were. It’s tense. The anticipation and dread is palpable. For the same reason as Don’t Look Now actually, because Temple has made one terrible choice and is now stuck with it. Not to a fatal end, but to something horrible for sure. This part of the film isn’t fun but it is incredibly well-made, especially given the limitations of the era. The look on her face as she is driven away? Harrowing.

The final act is apparently extremely divergent from the source material novel. Instead of whatever happens there, we get the all-too-unfortunately-common example of a woman being forced to sacrifice herself to “virtue”, entirely because of “moral failings” and the choices of men around her. Temple must ruin her reputation, and probably her future, because she “let” herself be the victim of sexual assault. It’s meant to redeem her in some sense, in the eyes of the moral police I suppose. Instead I just found it tiresome.

I do want to give this one another chance someday. One of the inherent dangers of a project like this is that I am watching these films randomly, whenever I have time, and sometimes I just choose the wrong one for the moment. I’ll try again, someday, and perhaps I’ll find something more worth paying attention to.