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Ann Dvorak's Big Future

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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Congorilla, and the 1930s adventure-travelogue


"The explorer-adventure-travelogue genre remained highly popular throughout the 1930s. A theme running through many of these was the challenging but triumphant deployment of western technologies in underdeveloped or inaccessible areas. With Byrd at the South Pole (1930) traced the plane voyage of Byrd across Antarctica, and The Mount Everest Flight (1933), an illustrated lecture by Air Commodore P. F. M. Fellows, depicted ‘the official story of man’s Conquest by Air of one of the last of the world’s explored areas’. Osa and Martin Johnson released Congorilla (1932), which included a few scenes among pygmies of the Belgian Congo (Zaı¨re) shot with synchronized sound. Western arrogance, American racial imagery, and the Johnsons’ churlish humour were particularly evident in one sequence: Martin gives a cigar to an unwary pygmy, who smokes it until becoming ill. With African adventure traditionally seen as dangerous and primitive, the presence of the diminutive and attractive Osa added a new twist to the safari film. The heterosocial realm of tourism was added to the homosocial world of male adventure, changing the dynamic. Osa provided a needed element of vulnerability and danger even as the ‘dark continent’ was being successfully colonized and tamed."





Across The World with Mr & Mrs Johnson, 1929





Sources:
Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey (1996). The Oxford History of World Cinema. Oxford University Press. p. 322
Journal of the Royal African Society, Vol. 32, No. 129 (Oct., 1933), p. 446
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qO9tsh7qIqo

Links:
https://travelfilmarchive.com/results.php?filmmaker_id=13
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_African_Society

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