by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I ran a 1929
movie called The Delightful Rogue I’d recently recorded from TCM, which I was interested in for a couple
of reasons. First, the star was Rod La Rocque, and after having just seen him
in what’s probably his most famous role — as the “bad” brother in the 1923 The
Ten Commandments — I thought it would be
interesting to watch him in a talkie. Also, Brad Kay’s Superbatone reissue of
Jane Green’s “almost complete recordings” — there’s at least one take of every
song this interesting and woefully short-lived (1897-1931) singer recorded,
though including the existing alternate takes would have made this longer than
a single CD — includes a song from this film, “Gay Love” (dig that title!) by
Oscar Levant and Sidney Clare, which Green recorded as voice double for the
film’s female lead, Rita La Roy. I’d seen The Delightful Rogue before in the 1980’s back when American Movie
Classics was what TCM is now — the cable channel for hard-core old-movie fanatics like me — before it
became “Debbie-ized” and turned into an outlet for dull, sodden “original”
shows — and hadn’t been impressed by it. I’m still not, though at least A.
Leslie Pearce’s direction is considerably more capable than the work of some
early talkie directors: at least he doesn’t have … the actors … insert those …
damnable … pauses … between hearing their
cue lines and speaking their own (watching a film like Behind That Curtain will make you understand why so many late-1920’s
critics actually thought silent films were more naturalistic than sound ones), and the voice
dubbing is handled more artfully than it was in many later musicals: Rita La
Roy’s speaking voice and Jane Green’s singing voice sound credible as the same
person, which didn’t always happen later.
The weaknesses of The Delightful
Rogue are the hackneyed nature
of the plot (the writer was Wallace Smith, who five years later came up with
the bizarrerie of The Captain Hates
the Sea — he seems to have been
the sort of writer who reveled in how weirdly he could mash up the standard
clichés, but sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t) and the horrible
appearance and voice of Rod La Rocque. For his role as “Lastro,” international
outlaw, murderer, (alleged) pirate (though the ship he sails on, a steam yacht,
doesn’t seem like an appropriate platform from which to commit piracy) and (it’s
hinted) deposed South American dictator, La Rocque adopts a hideous makeup with
so much goop in his hair it looks lacquered to his scalp, and to suggest
Latino-ness he speaks in a ridiculous voice that’s almost impossible to
describe — you really have to hear it to believe it, and wonder why La Rocque,
Pearce or whoever else might have been involved (imdb.com credits Lynn Shores
as a co-director but he was probably a producer instead) actually thought this
absurd accent would be credible as a Latino, or for that matter as a human
being. The plot takes place on the fictional South Seas island of Tapit
(“played” by Hollywood’s go-to location for Polynesia, Catalina), where Lastro
is determined to win cabaret singer Nydra (Rita La Roy) away from her rather
wimpy boyfriend Harry Beall (Charles Byer — and he’s blankly pretty but there’s
a reason you’ve never heard of him)
even though the entire Tapitian army (which seems to consist of an overweight
commander, an assistant officer and about 100 mixed-race enlisted men in
comic-opera uniforms) is out to capture him and collect the reward on his head.
(He makes a big to-do about the unflattering picture of him on his wanted
poster.)
He escapes the Tapitian army absurdly easily — either the commander is
an old friend of his, he bribed him, or both — and kidnaps both Nydra and
Beall. Lastro promises to release Beall in the morning if he can spend one
night with Nydra, only when he gets Nydra alone with him in his (ludicrously
well-appointed, given that we’re supposed to be on a small ship) bedroom he
announces that he’s not going to
… well, you know, with her. Only she
insists on remaining with him until dawn as a test of whether Beall truly loves
her enough to stay with her even if she spends a hot, sexy night with the
pirate … or at least makes it look like she has. Beall is predictably
disappointed and has a jealous hissy-fit, but agrees to leave with her — only
at the last minute she jumps out of the launch and somehow makes it back to
Lastro’s ship, united with her dashing pirate at the end. The Delightful
Rogue has its points of
interest, including the wild “Barbary Café” where Nydra performs (it’s owned by
a Jewish-stereotype comedian, Harry Semels, as “Hymie”), at which we see two
men dancing together in each other’s arms just before Nydra comes out and gives
forth with “Gay Love.” (Gay love, indeed!) Mostly, though, it’s just a slog
through the old cliché mill, and the two similarly named stars (both “R La R”!)
don’t have much chemistry — though given the horrible makeup and accent La
Rocque was saddled with, one can’t really criticize his acting, just feel
sympathy with him for what he was up against. As a silent with Rudolph
Valentino as star, The Delightful Rogue just might have worked, but as it
stands it really doesn’t have much to offer (and if Valentino had survived long
enough to make talkies, his career might have ended anyway if his producers had given him a script
like this!). When I looked it up on imdb.com a recent review by someone calling
him-, her- or itself “gerdeen-1” made fun of it in much the same way I would
have: “If you’re one of those people who celebrate ‘International Talk Like a
Pirate Day,’ check out La Rocque’s effort. You’ve got to be better at it than
he is.”
