After Platinum Blonde, Man’s Castle, and Midnight Mary, which together required her to play three different types of women at two other studios, Loretta felt more secure about her art. The reviews bolstered her confidence, and she knew it was only a matter of time before she would be moving on. But where?
In November 1932, Jesse Lasky announced his intention to become an independent producer at the Fox Film Corporation, with Zoo in Budapest and Berkeley Square as his first productions. Loretta was well aware of Famous Players-Lasky, the studio resulting from the Famous Players-Lasky Feature Plays merger in 1916, with Adolph Zukor as president, and Lasky as vice president for production. It was there that Loretta’s film career was launched in 1917. The company underwent various name changes, the most significant being the addition of “Paramount” in 1927. Paramount-Famous Players-Lasky was not the corporate name for long. Zukor was obsessed with creating a vertically integrated empire, with its own theatre chain, Publix. To prevent friction between the studio and its theater circuit, Lasky stepped aside. The new name was Paramount-Publix, eventually becoming just plain Paramount.
Lasky wanted Loretta for his first independent film, Zoo in Budapest (1933), with Gene Raymond as her costar. Raymond gave a bravura performance as Zanni, an animal trainer orphaned at an early age and raised by the director of the Budapest Zoo, where he grew into a combination of noble savage and animal activist, stealing fur stoles and burning them. Loretta also played an orphan, Eve, who is not as fortunate as Zanni. Eve lives in an orphanage, where a holiday is a trip to the zoo, and a chaperone or “keeper” is dependent on a guidebook to describe the attractions. Zanni locks eyes with Eve, beckoning to her to come with him. Another orphan, eager to cooperate, diverts the group’s attention by diving into a lake, making it possible for Eve to escape and join Zanni’s world, where humans bond with animals.
For those who only know Raymond as Jeanette MacDonald’s husband, his Zanni is a revelation. It is a strikingly athletic performance, requiring Raymond to jump over partitions, and in the terrifying climax, to hop on the back of an elephant with a young boy he has rescued. He must then grab on to a rope to hoist the boy and himself to safety—but not before a tiger leaps up and takes a piece out of Zanni’s leg. Regardless, Zanni survives, his gait no less springy, and both he and Eve are rewarded by the boy’s father, who makes it possible for Eve to leave the orphanage, marry Zani, and live in a cottage on his estate. In the last scene—which is more like the finale of an operetta—the couple arrives at their new home, radiantly happy and unperturbed about the future.
Loretta had relatively little to do in the film. The real stars were Raymond and director Rowland V. Lee, who kept a fragile script from splintering. Raymond fancied himself the successor to Douglas Fairbanks; however, it was Errol Flynn and then Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., who buckled the swash and wielded a mean rapier. Still, Raymond’s performance was admirable. He did not need a double; like Burt Lancaster, he did his own climbing and swinging, in addition to exuding the kind of machismo that won over audiences. Raymond was probably one of the leading men Loretta developed a crush on, not knowing at the time that he was bisexual, more homosexually than heterosexually inclined. In fact, when he married Jeanette MacDonald in 1937, she was still in love with Nelson Eddy, her first and only love. Raymond’s lover at the time was Mary Pickford’s husband, Buddy Rogers. On their honeymoon cruise to Hawaii, Jeanette and Raymond had a cabin next to Rogers and Pickford, then an incurable alcoholic: “There was a honeymoon going on—but the ones sleeping together were Gene Raymond and Buddy Rogers.” But at the time Zoo in Budapest was filmed, Raymond had not met MacDonald, and only a few kindred spirits knew his sexual preferences. As for Loretta, the crush ended when the shoot was over, and then it was on to another leading man and another crush.
Except for Heroes for Sale, her last films for Warner’s were as unmemorable as the first, requiring only that she have the stamina of a gymnast. For The Hatchet Man, she had to sit patiently in the makeup chair while she was turned into a mannequin and her face into a mask. Her best work was in the loan outs, which are now recognized as outstanding examples of pre-code filmmaking.
In addition to Wellman, the other director of note with whom she worked during her last year at Warner’s was the German-born Wilhelm, later, William, Dieterle, with whom she made two films. They would team up again in 1948, but at another studio, Paramount, for The Accused. Dieterle, with his white gloves and riding crop, tended to single out one of the featured players, generally a novice, for criticism bordering on harassment. He steered clear of the stars, either because they were seasoned performers or because he knew they would not tolerate such behavior.
The Devil’s in Love (1933) is more revelatory of Dieterle’s ability as a director than Loretta’s as an actress. If the misleading title attracted moviegoers expecting a steamy love story, they saw instead an imaginatively made film set in North Africa, where a French doctor, André Morand (Victor Jory), selflessly tends to the wounded, including a sadistic major who belittles his subordinates, including Salazar (J. Carrol Naish, Hollywood’s ethnic specialist). When Morand is falsely accused of the major’s murder, he escapes with the help of his boyhood friend, Jean Fabien (David Manners), to a port city, where he practices medicine under an assumed name, favoring the needy over the privileged. A friar prevails upon Morand, who, in another age would have belonged to “Doctors without Borders,” to volunteer at his mission, where he meets and falls in love with Margot (Loretta), the friar’s niece and Jean’s fiancée. For the trio to become a duo, one of the men has to die. The Devil’s in Love could end either way, particularly since Manners exudes more sex appeal than Jory, the better actor. Appearances are deceiving, and the ending does not disappoint. Truth triumphs, Salazar confesses to the murder, and Jean dies in battle, freeing Margot for Morand.
There have been better desert dramas than The Devil’s In Love, such as Under Two Flags, Beau Geste, and Gunga Din. But the chief reasons the film is worth viewing are Dieterle’s direction and Hal Mohr’s poetic photography. Because Dieterle understood German expressionism, he was able to modify it for American consumption, purging it of its excesses and leaving in its place a monochrome palette, with subtle gradations of black and white. Photographed in the evening, Loretta did not so much look backlit as moonlit. The nighttime insurgency, with a disproportionate distribution of light and shadow—the only light sources being torches, the moon, and the natives’ white robes—and the rebels on horseback, streaming over the sand as if they were riding the waves, was so breathtaking that one ceases to care whether Morand will be exonerated and marry Margot. Dieterle knew audiences expected the insurgency to be crushed, as indeed it was. But in the movies defeat can be ignominious or glorious. Here, the rebels do not so much die as make a graceful exit into another realm. A director can only achieve such visual poetry with the help of a sympathetic cinematographer, like Mohr, who also seems to have heard the siren call of the desert and to have responded with as much mystery as the budget allowed—which was enough to make the dark of the moon more romantic than ominous.
Dieterle’s Grand Slam (1933) was a “triumph of the underdog” movie, set in the world of contract bridge, portrayed as if it had replaced baseball as the national pastime. One could get that impression from the tournament headlines that blazed across the screen, as families huddled around the radio to hear whether Stanislavky (Paul Lucas) would beat Van Dorn (Ferdinand Gottschalk) to regain his title as bridge champion. Since both share a lower middle class background, they would seem to have come up the hard way. The difference is that Stanislavky never denied his origins, while Van Dorn buried his. When Stanislavky publishes a book on contract bridge (which was ghost written), he proves, with his wife Marcia (Loretta) as partner, that his book can bring bridge-playing couples closer together. However, a cross-country tour creates such friction between the two of them that the Stanislavsky method seems to be a failure. The marriage is on the verge of deteriorating after the press learns the truth about Stanislavsky’s bestseller. Determined to challenge Van Dorn one last time, Stanislavsky is losing until Marcia sweeps into the room and becomes his partner. Naturally, he wins, the marriage remains intact, the couple give up bridge, and Stanislavsky does what he always wanted to do: He writes political treatises.
Although Lucas was the star, turning on enough continental charm to air out Stanislavsky’s stuffiness, Loretta played Marcia as if she were an experienced bridge player, and she looked enticing in her pre-code décolletage. Capra might have found a heart somewhere in the manipulative script, but Dieterle knew enough about plot templates to follow the rubrics.
Loretta’s last Warner Bros. film, She Had to Say Yes (1933), had her playing a “working girl,” Florence, a garment district secretary, expected to entertain buyers by dining and clubbing with them but shopping short of one-night stands, although that caveat was never enforced, as long as the buyer signed the contract. Loretta’s costars were two competent but uncharismatic actors: Regis Toomey, as her supervisor and would-be fiancé, and Lyle Talbot, never intended to be a leading man, as a buyer, who respects Florence until he mistakenly concludes that she is damaged goods and therefore available. A near rape in a darkened bedroom, with the only light coming from a moonlit window, is averted when the buyer realizes that Florence is not playing hard to get, but only preserving whatever remains of the dignity she has had to sacrifice to entertain buyers without making herself part of the entertainment. Although the role did not call for an elaborate wardrobe, Loretta looked her beatific self, as if she were slouching toward sainthood, needing only a nimbus to encircle her head upon arrival.
Loretta was not sorry to leave Warner’s. Like Coriolanus, she believed there was a world elsewhere, with better roles awaiting her. There were, but not as many as she had hoped.