The Love Trap

#24 in my ranking of William Wyler’s filmography.

Ah, a first sound film. I love these things.

I don’t know the actual history of The Love Trap, whether the sudden popularity of The Jazz Singer‘s technology happened at a point where they stopped production to transition to sound, or if they had already finished production only to send it back to change part of it for release (I would guess the former, to be honest). However, whichever way it happened, it’s obvious that there’s a certain rushed quality to it, buoyed by a lot of William Wyler’s skill as a filmmaker that he transitions well to the sound era while finding a way to keep this new found dialogue thing to work appropriately. Essentially, the final third of the film, the part in sound, looks like it would fit in with almost any pre-Code Hollywood film. It may not be the surprisingly raucous and technologically impressive presentation of the technology that Ernst Lubitsch managed in The Love Parade, but it’s much more accomplished than either Ford‘s The Black Watch or Hitchcock‘s part-talkie, Blackmail.

Speaking of Blackmail, that film gets attention because of one moment (one very good, inventive moment) where the main character hears only the word knife on the soundtrack. It’s a great little moment, but the rest of the film’s sound sequences are boring, flat demonstrations of blithe nonsense masquerading as dialogue. That’s not the case here, but I’ll get to the sound in a minute.

First, the story.

Evelyn (Laura La Plante) is a chorus girl who gets fired from her job on the night she needs to pay rent. Convinced to go to a rich party by her friend Bunny (Jocelyn Lee), she meets two men. The first is Judge Harrington (Norman Trevor), a stuffy older man uninterested in her playful attitude, and the second is Guy (Robert Ellis), a well-respected young man of the elite who does a few tricks to get Evelyn up to his bedroom and undressed. She is not pleased and storms out, all while Judge Harrington watches in amazement, getting the exact wrong impression about Evelyn, her behavior, and Guy’s guilt in the matter. That would be the end of it if Evelyn weren’t to go home to find all of her things on the streetcorner, having been evicted from her apartment. When it begins to rain, a young man riding by in a cab, Paul (Neil Hamilton), sees her plight, takes pity on her, and hires three more cabs to carry all of her stuff away. Where? Just away. Taking a step back, it seems a bit weird and almost sinister, but Paul is a good guy. When the four cabs stop in the middle of nowhere, insisting on getting paid, they throw everything out, even when Paul pays up with a few hundred dollars (a solid hundred short).

Now, this film is primarily a comedy, and this section is, at best, lightly amusing. There are shots here and there that elicit a good little chuckle, but the whole thing about just driving away with her, getting the cab driver to make a sharp turn so Evelyn falls in Paul’s arms, and then just being left in the countryside is so odd and borderline dangerous without a real relief from that danger that it prevents it from being really funny, I think. I was slightly amused by what was going on, but I felt like comedy was simply not Wyler’s strong suit, that his comic sensibilities were simply not tight enough or funny enough to pull off a comedy.

Then, at about the halfway point, it turns more into a drama, and I think the film regains its feet a bit. It will take those feet and dance a jig by the end, but the scenes where Paul introduces his new bride to his mother and sister are carried almost entirely by La Plante who, besides having a bright and attractive smile, gives a surprisingly subtle performance, especially in moments where she’s more melancholic or sad, the rejection by her new in-laws providing her with the perfect opportunity for that. Once we discover that Judge Harrington is actually Paul’s uncle, though, things go dour. Invited to dinner the next night, none of the family shows up, offering up an excuse that Paul’s mother is too sick to attend.

It’s here where the sound suddenly gets introduced, and it’s at the moment where the film fully drops its comedic senses in favor of more dramatic ones. The first major scene with sound has no soundtrack but the sound captured on stage (a marked contrast to the generally happier score written by Joseph Cherniavsky). It’s a tightly written dialogue scene of anger, disappointment, and threats. The story moves on as Bunny brings a host of people, including Guy, over to Evelyn’s house to cheer her up, igniting a party that Paul and family walk in on, further creating a terrible impression. And then we get to the final ten minutes of the film, an escalating comic sequence involving only Evelyn and Judge Harrington that brings back a series of setups from earlier in the film, including how Guy tried to seduce Evelyn in the film’s first scenes. It’s really funny.

The second half of the film is stronger than the first. Wyler brings his expert eye to the film from the start, including some very nice shots of a chorus line’s legs or the rear trio of cab drivers getting out from their cars at the same time, but the comic sensibilities fall a bit flat in that first section. It really comes much more alive in the second after Eve and Paul get married, and especially when the sound gets introduced. The final major sequence between Evelyn and the Judge is kind of hilarious, and because it relies on so much of what was built into the narrative beforehand, it helps carry the film as a whole. My only real complaint about the ending is a sudden turn around with Paul that seems to come out of nowhere. Giving him a moment earlier where he expresses distrust of Guy, at least, might have done something to make it feel less random.

The Love Trap is William Wyler’s first sound film, and it’s an accomplished one. He doesn’t make a weird directing choice like Ford, and he doesn’t rely on inane dialogue like Hitchcock, choosing instead to make what would essentially become a pretty standard pre-Code finale to a film from a technical point of view. It also ends up being a small delight, anchored by a winning performance from Laura La Plante, and another point in Wyler’s favor as a testament to his talent.

Rating: 3/4