Post by rmichaelpyle on Mar 30, 2009 4:07:59 GMT -6
Watched another film last night with both Nancy Carroll and Phillips Holmes. This one was "Stolen Heaven" (1931). I had watched "The Devil's Holiday" (1930) last week and reviewed it here. Nancy Carroll and Phillips Holmes were a a decent team paired together. They made five pictures together between 1929 and 1932, so they must have been thought of as a team in some sort of way for a while. "Stolen Heaven" begins with Nancy Carroll being on the street. She's a pick-up, having lost her job during the Depression. She takes home a man who is acting strangely (Phillips Holmes). It turns out Holmes has been shot, the shot having richocheted off his head and dizzied him a great deal (imagine that!). He, too, has lost his job and so he has just robbed a company of $20,000. (Think how much that is during the Great Depression!) He's made a pact with himself to spend the money, doing all the things he's ever wished to do, then kill himself. Well, now Carroll becomes involved and they plan to do the same thing together. Eventually Louis Calhern becomes a part of the plot. All the time, Edward Keane, playing a cop, is hot on the trail, and though the part is rather thankless, actually Keane makes the part memorable in a minor way. I won't give away what happens, but suffice it to say that this is really a good pre-coder, though compared to some, rather innocent. It has some meat to it in places, and in others is rather vapid. Directed by George Abbott who had directed "All Quiet On The Western Front" only a year earlier, this was definitely fun to watch, though in the end only a potboiler, but a very fine one. I must admit that I really have enjoyed seeing Nancy Carroll in the last week these couple of times, and I hope to make her filmic acquaintance much more in the future. I've seen a good deal of Phillips Holmes outside of these, but for those not aware, his career was already on the wane when he died tragically in 1942 in a mid-air plane collision.
