Free Hollywood Madonna by Bernard F. Dick Page B

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 becrushed, 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