Leonard Maltin's 151 Best Movies You've Never Seen - Maltin, Leonard [50]
The performances in La Promesse are extraordinary, and the Dardennes apparently thought so, too, as they cast Olivier Gourmet in their subsequent films The Son, Rosetta, and The Child, which also starred a grown-up Jérémie Renier.
La Promesse won citations as Best Foreign Film from the National Society of Film Critics and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, but it never achieved widespread recognition among American moviegoers. It’s never too late to catch up with this brilliant movie.
69. LADY FOR A DAY
(1933)
Directed by Frank Capra
Screenplay by Robert Riskin
Based on the story Madame La Gimp by Damon Runyon
Actors:
WARREN WILLIAM
MAY ROBSON
GUY KIBBEE
GLENDA FARRELL
JEAN PARKER
WALTER CONNOLLY
NED SPARKS
NAT PENDLETON
HALLIWELL HOBBES
HOBART BOSWORTH
ROBERT EMMETT O’CONNOR
WARD BOND
IRVING BACON
SAMUEL S. HINDS
When people ask me why I love old movies so much, it’s difficult for me to describe in words the way they make me feel, but all their best qualities are embodied in one film that ought to be more celebrated: Frank Capra’s Lady for a Day. I’m not suggesting that it’s forgotten, or that it wasn’t appreciated in its day, when it was nominated for four Oscars, including Best Picture, but it doesn’t have the reputation of It Happened One Night, which Capra and screenwriter Robert Riskin made the following year, or later gems like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life.
One reason for this is that the film was out of circulation for many years, deliberately held back when the director remade it in 1961 as Pocketful of Miracles. Decades of exposure on television and in the 16mm market that helped to stoke the reputation of other 1930s movies were denied this one.
I was an adolescent when I fell in love with old movies, but it took me a long time to catch up with Lady for a Day, and I’ll never forget the experience. My wife and I attended a matinee at the Regency Theater on Broadway and Sixty-seventh Street in Manhattan (now gone, alas) and when it was over we walked home on a cloud.
This is the magical quality that great movies of that era possess: they actually make you feel better. I’m not talking about empty escapism, but a kind of entertainment that lifts your spirits. This is a high form of art, it seems to me, though it is too seldom recognized as such.
Lady for a Day is based on a story by Damon Runyon, the New York columnist and short-story writer whose name has entered the dictionary to describe quaint, colorful characters like the ones who populate the musical based on his work, Guys and Dolls.
Veteran actress May Robson plays Apple Annie, a ragged old woman who sells apples on the street, and who is viewed as a kind of good-luck charm by gangster Dave the Dude (Warren William). When Annie needs help, Dave’s girlfriend, Missouri Martin (Glenda Farrell), talks him into doing the right thing. It seems Annie has been corresponding with her daughter, who’s attending school in Europe, and pretending that she’s part of New York society. Now the grown-up daughter (Jean Parker) is coming to the city with her fiancé, and Annie can’t bear the thought that she’ll be unmasked as a fraud. So Dave and his cronies knock themselves out to give Annie a temporary home in a mansion, and a complete makeover, in order to continue the masquerade in person.
Capra loved actors and always cast his movies well. Warren William was an elegant, somewhat theatrical leading man (referred to in some circles as the poor man’s John Barrymore), and Glenda Farrell was the quintessential 1930s wisecracker. They were borrowed from Warner Bros., where they churned out one snappy movie after another in the early 1930s, to star in this Columbia production. Lady for a Day is also filled to the brim with familiar character actors including bumptious Guy Kibbee, sourpuss Ned Sparks, big lummox Nat Pendleton, perennial butler Halliwell Hobbes,