(4/5)

One of the biggest joys of this festival has been the opportunity to catch new restoration prints of films that haven’t been seen at this level of quality since their original release, and even see a few that have been unavailable for quite a while. The Story of Temple Drake is an even more special case. The film was made in 1933, just when the Hays Office was cracking down, monitoring films more closely and exercising more control than they had in the previous few years. They ranked films according to whether they could be recut and exhibited, allowed to fulfill their existing runs before being suppressed, or outright banned. Temple Drake was outright banned, assumedly because of its frank (though non-explicit) depiction of sexual desire, rape, and multiple non-marital relationships. According to the Museum of Modern Art representative at the festival, the film was screened a very few times in 1933, then shelved until TCM asked MoMA (who had received a high-quality camera negative from Fox as part of a general archive donation) to restore and strike a print of it for this festival. As far as I could gather, it has been extremely difficult to see at all in the intervening years, outside of a few lower-resolution prints belonging to collectors. (One of these prints has been put on YouTube, but not in the kind of quality of the MoMA restoration.)

The film is based on a William Faulkner story, and you can definitely see his Southern Gothic style and themes coming through. Temple Drake (Miriam Hopkins) is the flirtatious granddaughter of a well-respected judge. She flits from boy to boy, teasing and going further than a respectable woman of the time should, but not as far as the boys would like. She’s loved by the upstanding Stephen, a young lawyer who she refuses to marry. One night as she’s out with another boy, their car crashes and they’re intercepted by a rough family of bootleggers – a family with men who take what they want and won’t put up with Temple’s “no” the way the boys she’s used to do. This is a world where she’s not in control, and sex is a weapon wielded by men, not a game played by women.

The story certainly has its lurid elements; of course, it’s nothing compared to what’s on our current screens, but it’s interesting to look at it through Hays Code eyes. There’s really not anything explicit in it, but it deals with elements that the Hays Code would rather have ignored entirely, and it deals with them from the point of view of a woman who’s fairly sexually liberated for the time. You could probably argue that the trajectory of Temple’s story is a punishment for her behavior at the beginning, but really, the film isn’t nearly so simple – which may, in fact, be what the Hays Code had against it. The “she was asking for it” defense of rape could be invoked here, but the film really doesn’t encourage it. Temple is a tease and a flirt, perhaps more, but the film never, ever suggests that she deserves what happens to her – on the other hand, it doesn’t let her off the hook, either, but forces her to choose between covering up certain events to protect her honor and revealing them to serve justice in a related murder trial.

The tension in Temple’s character – the fact that she’s gossiped about by her social peers because of her lackadaisical attitude toward upper middle class sexual mores, and simultaneously called a “nice woman” (with an contextual meaning of sexual purity and even prudishness) by Ruby, girlfriend of one of the bootleggers – is one of the things that makes the film really interesting, even decades later when these categories of women have changed dramatically. The scenes when she’s with Trigger, the most dangerous member of the bootlegger group, show her shifting almost imperceptibly between wanting to escape and go back to her former life, to leave and disappear completely out of shame, and stay with him out of…what? Some combination of fear, possibly fascination, and a sense that she’s “bad” and deserves it. None of this is stated so explicitly in the film, but it’s in Hopkins’ eyes, the sudden glances, the slight physical movements of determination and defeat.

The style of the film is very Southern Gothic, too; shades of Expressionism with a languorous underbelly of sweat and grime. The lighting and art direction clearly signal the change between Temple’s safe and knowable world and the world she enters with the car crash, but it’s not merely a contrast of good and evil. There are degrees of good among the bootleggers, just as there are men among her society friends who wouldn’t be much better than the bootleggers if given half a chance. Also, the implied comparison between Temple and Ruby is striking – Ruby is both the woman Temple may become (in social position), and a woman who is utterly dedicated to one man, which Temple is not and by society’s standards should be.

There’s a lot that could be done with both gender and class politics with this film, but it’s also a pleasure to watch. Hopkins is great as Temple, bringing a lot more subtlety to the character than I expected; the well-off people in the picture tend to be a little more on the wooden side, but the bootleggers are all pretty gripping and/or menacing as necessary. The villain Trigger is a little one-note, but that’s his role, and he carries it off. Also, the ending is a bit abrupt, but I kind of appreciate that about ’30s films sometimes; they’re tight, to the point, and economical in their storytelling, and that’s exactly how Temple Drake is. I don’t know if they’ll be releasing a DVD from this restoration at some point in the future, but if they do and you’re interested in early 1930s films, especially ones that ran afoul of the Production Code, Temple Drake is definitely worth a look.