Tue Aug 30, 2011 12:49 am
I just saw `Are You Listening?' - it's an entertaining Pre-Code, no masterpiece but worth a look, particularly given the interesting setting.
There are two main plot strands that don't interact very much - in fact it sometimes feels like two films in one. Haines, a radio advertising copy writer, is battling his estranged wife (Karen Morley) to let him marry his radio actress girlfriend Laura (Madge Evans). Laura meanwhile is dealing with her two sisters, a seasoned gold-digger (Anita Page) and naive teenage Honey (Joan Marsh), who is getting her first taste of the big city. Anita's quite fun in her role, but doesn't have much to do, while Karen manages to inject a bit of dimension into an essentially one-note character. Evans and Marsh are fine, but you never feel that their roles could not have been played by any other ingenue of the time.
The twist comes quite late in the film, and really pushes things in a different direction. It would probably have had even more impact to contemporary audiences, given that it turns the typical Haines grin-and-joke-your-way-out-of-trouble formula on its head. Though his performance in general lacks some of its usual ebullence, Haines handles it well. It's a shame to think that he, Page and Morley were all on the MGM scrap heap not much later.
Will Hays would have been all over this one like a rash, particularly the ending. It reminded me of what I admire most about Pre-Codes: there are no absolutes, everybody's both good and bad rather than one or the other.
