Dangerous (1935)
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Dangerous Movie Review
Dangerous is a 1935 melodrama directed by Alfred E. Green and starring Bette Davis and Franchot Tone. It is a pretty good, if flawed drama.
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“I’m bad for people.
I don’t mean to be, but I can’t help myself“
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The film is your regular 30s melodrama which is exaggerated in its characters and story, but I personally love that so I enjoyed this film quite a bit. It follows a woman who has “bad luck” surrounding her and thus she lost her movie career and is now spending days as a drunk. An architect takes her in, helps her and the two start a romance which eventually crumbles upon her many bad decisions.
The major problem I’ve had with this film is its third act which is somewhat difficult to process. The twist here is that it turns out she has been married all along to a man who won’t divorce her as he is obsessed with her. So she crashes the car in order to kill one of them, she breaks up with Don Bellows and she eventually reconciles with her husband.
Yes, that all sounds very far-fetched, though admittedly incredibly entertaining. I just found the overall marriage storyline somewhat lazy and they should have chosen a better way for these two to end their relationship. However, I still loved that ending as following Joyce become a better person and strive to change her life for the better was rewarding and it’s a great character drama.
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Joyce Heath is an excellent character and of course Don Bellows is also very good and highly likable, though his urge to quickly marry was too old-fashioned and pushy for my liking. Gail Armitage is too good-natured, but Mrs. Williams is a lot of fun.
The film is very well acted across the board with the highlights being Franchot Tone and Bette Davis of course. Tone is very strong per usual and he remains a very underrated, very good actor from this period who always delivered and here he was particularly endearing and charming. And naturally Davis excelled at playing this complex role and she was suited for it remarkably well. She excelled in those monologues and especially emotional moments and I am happy that she won an Oscar for this role.
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Dangerous isn’t particularly well directed as Alfred E. Green could have done a better job and the film is way too short. However, that led to an immensely entertaining film which flies by how fun it is. It is also emotionally rewarding with very good character development and some great dialogue. I loved the romantic interactions between the main two characters, the rain scenes are excellent and of course that ending is satisfying. The dialogue is quick, clever and sophisticated as I’d come to expect from 1930s Hollywood films. So overall, the film is quite good, but not as great as it could have been.
Although the third act features a twist that is somewhat difficult to grasp, Dangerous is still a very strong, emotionally rewarding melodrama with very good characterization, excellent dialogue, a couple of terrific, memorable sequences and two superb performances from Franchot Tone and Bette Davis in her Oscar-winning role.
