Two Little Girls with Big Futures! "The passage of time has been very kind to Three on a Match and Ann Dvorak, as the film now is considered a quintessential pre-Code classic, complete with sex, drugs, booze, skin, kidnapping, suicide, and magnified nose-hair plucking. For modern audiences aware of the ultra-sanitized scenarios that would plague American films for decades once the Production Code was aggressively enforced, Three on a Match stands out as a delightfully shocking and racy example of early 1930s Hollywood. Ann is only mildly effective as the society wife but comes to dominate the film once her downfall begins, and the train wreck that is Vivian Revere is mesmerizing. Any pent-up nervous energy Ann may have had in real life is unleashed through Vivian and she isn’t afraid to look like hell to bring this character to life. In one scene, as she waits for Blondell to exit a beauty parlor in order to hit her up for cash, Ann appears emaciated with dark circles under her ey...
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Asta Nielsen
"Frequently lauded as “die Duse des Kinos” [the Duse of the cinema], as Poul Elsner noted in Weltrundschau in 1911 (517), the Danish actress Asta Nielsen was the first major star of German silent film. She acted in more than seventy films, all but four of them made with German production companies, during the twenty-two years of her film career. The phenomenal success of her debut film, Afgrunden/The Abyss (1910) enabled her to become the first global film star under the new monopoly distribution system. From 1910 to 1914, she collaborated closely with director Urban Gad, who was also her first husband, under the auspices of Deutsche Bioscop and Projektions-AG “Union” (PAGU), and later established two film companies of her own.
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Nielsen’s cinema debut, Afgrunden, was a collaboration with screenwriter/director Gad made on a minuscule budget over the course of a single week that came about almost accidentally as a last-ditch attempt to raise her profile in the Copenhagen acting world, but when it premiered in Copenhagen on September 12, 1910, it became an overnight international sensation. Afgrunden was one of the earliest and most successful Danish erotic melodramas, an extremely profitable genre throughout Europe between 1910 and 1915. The film’s plot line is high melodrama: Nielsen’s character, the respectable bourgeois music teacher Magda Vang, becomes engaged to a pastor’s son but runs away instead with a circus cowboy named Rudolph, who cheats on her with other women, forces her to play piano in cafés to support his drinking habit, and ultimately tries to extort money from her abandoned fiancé. When she protests, Rudolph tries to strangle her, forcing Magda to stab him to death with a table knife. The final scene of the film shows a dazed, dry-eyed Magda being led away by the police."
"Nielsen’s minimalistic acting style, particularly evident in the memorable final scene, contrasted sharply with the histrionics of other early film actresses, while her remarkably expressive eyes and provocative but restrained sensuality, which featured prominently in the film’s extended erotic gaucho dance sequence, enraptured audiences and critics alike."
"In 1924, the Hungarian-born film commentator and theorist Béla Balázs described the subtlety of Nielsen’s sexual appeal:
She is never undressed, she does not show her thighs like Anita Berber…, and yet this dancing harlot could take lessons from Asta Nielsen. Her belly dancing is tame compared to Asta Nielsen fully dressed. … [Asta Nielsen’s] spiritualized eroticism is demonically dangerous, since it works at a distance through all of her clothes."
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