As I've been making my way through the entire Bette Davis theatrical filmography, I've been winding down with plenty of cheap quickies from Davis' very prolific 1930s period as a Warner Bros. contract player, and most of them are entirely forgettable (some are quite a bit worse than that). So I wasn't expecting much out of
The Girl From 10th Avenue, one of five movies that Davis made in 1935 alone. It's overshadowed by that year's
Dangerous, for which Davis won her first Oscar (although the movie itself is a bit
underwhelming), and it's not generally mentioned in discussions of Davis' best work from the period. So I was pleasantly surprised to find a fun, entertaining movie with a great Davis performance, albeit opposite a male lead without much screen presence.
Directed by Alfred E. Green, who worked with Davis on seven films (including
Dangerous),
10th Avenue bears a bit of resemblance to the 1932 Green/Davis collaboration
The Rich Are Always With Us, which also poked fun at the antics of rich society narcissists, although
10th Avenue is less comedic and not as clever. It's also a bit disjointed, running only 70 minutes and abruptly jumping ahead in time at several points. Davis plays a working-class girl named Miriam Brady who happens upon rich lawyer Geoffrey Sherwood (Ian Hunter) as he drunkenly loiters outside his ex's wedding. Miriam gets Geoffrey off the street and spends an evening with him, after which they wake up to find themselves married.
Instead of a wacky misunderstanding, this is played as a beneficial arrangement for both; Miriam helps Geoffrey get sober, and Geoffrey provides Miriam with a more comfortable lifestyle. But once Geoffrey has his life together, the vain Valentine (Katherine Alexander) decides that she wants him back. Miriam is a great strong-willed Davis character, both when standing up to Geoffrey and his old-boys-club chums and when fending off Valentine's designs on her husband (whom she comes to love, of course). Determined to fit in with high society, she enlists the aid of her landlady (Alison Skipworth), a former society dame herself, tackling every challenge with confidence. Instead of deriving comedy from a commoner attempting to act sophisticated, the movie treats Miriam with respect, and Davis gives her a combination of sauciness and dignity.
The movie's centerpiece is a delightfully catty confrontation between Miriam and Valentine at a fancy restaurant, which eventually involves the throwing of a grapefruit, and Davis is at her sharp-tongued best here, while Alexander does what she can to keep up. Davis shines again as Miriam confronts Geoffrey over his romantic indecisiveness, but Hunter isn't quite up to the task of sparring with her, and the two have minimal chemistry throughout the movie, making their abrupt happily-ever-after at the end especially jarring. Colin Clive, best known as Dr. Frankenstein in
James Whale's films, is much more charismatic as the poor sap Valentine dumps to attempt to win Geoffrey back, but he has only a few scenes to shine in. The movie really belongs to Davis, and it probably deserves a more prominent spot among her flood of '30s roles.
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