Barbara Stanwyck For(/In) "Ten Cents a Dance," a 1931 Movie Directed by Lionel Barrymore

Offhand, I don't recall any movie opening credits "Inspired by the song..." and was surprised to read them in the opening credits of the 1931 Columbia Studio movie "Ten Cents a Dance" the sixth and final feature film directed by Lionel Barrymore, a year before he on a best actor Oscar and settled into lifetime employment by MGM. (He'd been nominated for an Oscar as best director for the 1929 Ruth Chatterton version of "Madame X," a quintessential "women's picture.)

The music for the 1930 song popularized by Ruth Etting was written by Richard Rodgers, with lyrics by Lorenz Hart. It references . Ten cents in 1930-31 was a non-trivial charge, but the dancer played by Barbara Stanwyck at the start of her long movie career was not living particularly well.

At work she is a tough dame, what I'd expect from other, somewhat later pre-Code Stanwyck movies such as "Baby Face." Her character, Barbara O'Neill, doesn't know how to pick'em (men), being in love with Eddie Miller (Monroe Owsley, who was then better known than she was), who is a coward, a liar, and a thief - putting them in alphabetical order.

Barbara received a hundred dollar tip from magnate Bradley Carlton (Ricardo Cortez) for talking rather than dancing in the dance hall. I think Carlton was not only rich, but better looking, and more honet than Eddie, but love is so often deaf and blind...

Barbara sent Eddie for a job in Carlton's firm. Eddie gambles and otherwise lives behind his means, as Barbara is content to play housewife, holding off the creditors. The screenplay provides not even a suggestion of why the hard-bitten dame turns into such a mouse.

... But not forever. Barbara is willing to swallow any pride that remains after months of marriage to and neglect by Eddie. Stanwyck is electrifying in the last quarter hour with both Cortez and Owsley.

Before TCM and the exhumation of pre-Code movies, I didn't know who Richard Cortez (né Joseph Krantz, a not very Latino name... He played Sam Spade in the first adaptation of The Maltese Falcon [Dangerous Female, 1931] and Perry Mason [The Case of the Black Cat [1936)], but was generally the cad; herein he is something of a womanizer but a gentleman with Owsley playing the cad) was. He got shot by women in a lot of movies, and I thought was going to be shot by Eddie in this one.

Viewers are not going to learn much about the institution of taxi halls, but can see that Stanwyck could play a considerable range of emotion even way back when. She could dance a lot better than any of her taxi-hall customers as was demonstrated in "Lady of Burlesque" (1943) before being perhaps the most fatal and fatalistic of femmes fatales in "Double Indemnity" (1944) or the matriarch of "The Big Valley" on tv during the late-1960s.