Corruption and Melodrama in the Movie Adaptation of "Ann Vickers" (1933)

The 1933 movie adaptation of Sinclair Lewis's best-selling novel Ann Vicker, directed by John Cromwell, crams a lot of material into a mere 72 minutes of running-time. There are two main arcs. The more-encompassing one is the love life and out-of-wedlock pregnancies of the title character, played by Irene Dunne. The first one is the result of bad judgment, being seduced by a caddish US Army captain (Bruce Cabot), who is about to go off to war and convinced Ann he loved her. When he returns, after she has miscarried, she quickly surmises that "love" was just a line, and she does not tell him that she had been carrying and lost their "love child."

The inner arc is the career of Ann Vickers, social worker, who goes to work in a prison, challenges the mistreatment of prisoners, is framed up and removed, writes a best-selling exposé (99 Days in Prison has less a ring to it than "20,000 Days in Sing-Sing"!), and eventually gets a detention facility of her own to run. The idealist Ann seems a female variant on Martin Arrowsmith, the medical researcher in Sinclair Lewis's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Arrowsmith. She does not run aground against small-town prejudices as he did at first and asCarol Kennicott, the heroine of Main Street did.

Ann's successful career leads to a romance with a judge named Barney Dolphin (Where did Lewis come up with that name?!), played by Walter Huston, seemingly in training to play Sam Dodsworth, at least insofar as he is putting up with a superficial wife making the scene in Europe with titled spongers on his money. He is convicted of insider trading and Ann loses her position because of her association with him. She also has his child, a planned out-of-wedlock pregnancy that produces Matthew, a blond boy who bears no resemblance to either parent (he looks more like a boy version of Shirley Temple).

It is easy to miss that Ann spends the night with her captain (she has on her jacket and is about to leave, and then his jacket falls to the floor, there is a cut to looking out the window at night and then daylit) and then finds a memento growing in her, but she decisively chooses to bear a child to her older lover who cannot get a divorce. It is also not clear what employment she receives after she is forced to resign from running a prison for women. The Depression does not seem to have impaired her ability to have a career and be devoted to a disgraced man. (Many are the Hollywood movies from the Depression set in an upper-class milieu with no apparent impact of the Depression!)

There are some harsh (at least for the time) prison scenes, a warden far more corrupt than the judge who is sent to prison and a sadist rivalling the one Hume Cronyn would later turn in for Jules Dassin in "Brute Force" Although not quite providing comic relief, Ann is supplied with a wise, astringent, but devoted pal in the person of Edna May Oliver. There just isn't much development with all the incidents jammed into an hour and twelve minutes and the movie's only interest now is historical.

Ann decides that love is more important than her career, but in effect this was a decision she already made early on with the captain. I guess that Ann "has it all" (love, career, an adorable child) but not at the same time. She is the breadwinner at the end, but her career was significantly derailed by love and devotion to the judge turned convict.

Walter Huston received top billing, though he does not appear until the midpoint of the movie and it is Irene Dunne who bears most of the (melo)dramatic weight (not to mention all the children): she must be onscreen at least 98 percent of the running time. Before the Production Code began being enforced in mid-1934, Dunne seems to have specialized in playing unwed mothers, and starred in some more soap operas after unwed mothers were banned from the screen (Age of Innocence, Magnificent Obsession, Love Affair, A Guy Named Joe) and in 1946 worked again with John Cromwell, playing the British governess Anna in "Anna and the King of Siam." As I suggested, Huston was warming up to play the title role of another Sinclair Lewis mistreated husband in the stage and screen adaptations of Dodsworth. Cromwell moved on to direct the Bette Davis incarnation of Mildred Of Human Bondage in 1934 and the Hollywood remake of Péée le Moko, Algiers in1938, and sired actor Jason Cromwell in 1940.

The most satisfying adaptations of Sinclair Lewis novels are Dodsworth, directed by William Wyler with Huston and Ruth Chatterton in 1936 and Elmer Gantry, directed by Richard Brooks with Burt Lancaster, Jean Simmons, and Shirley Jones in 1960. There were both silent films and 1930s sound adaptations of Lewis's canonical novels Main Street and Babbitt, which I haven't seen, and a visually striking adaptation of Arrowsmith directed by Johnn Ford in 1931 with Ronald Colman, Helen Hayes, Myrna Loy and one of the first onscreen representations of a black professional person (the doctor portrayed by Oliver Marchand).