Early Errol at his best. First, the weird trivia bit. In the 20s and 30s, whenever Warner Bothers showed a movie marquee in a film, they would use the fictitious movie title "Another Dawn" on the marquee. As sort of an inside joke, and because no one could come up with a good name for this movie, Warner Brothers decided to actually make a movie by that name. Thus, Another Dawn came out in 1937.
Actually a really good film. Action in the desert, British colonial officers, love triangle. For a trite plot line, it was very well written, including such great lines as:
"Most of our guests don't feel happy unless they're perspiring."
"Don't come back with a wound stripe." Response - "They do tend to mess up one's uniform."
"Running out of ammunition, but not Arabs."
"It isn't by accident that the buglers can play 'The Last Post' better than anything else."
And my favorite:
"Five dead...can hold out until sunset...having a marvelous time...wish you were here."
The writer of these lines was Laird Doyle. Born in 1907 (in Ashley, Illinois), he started work for Warner Bothers in 1934. He wrote about twenty screeplays, and then died at 29 in 1936 in an airplane crash. He wrote both the story and screenplay for Another Dawn, but didn't live to see the final movie come out in 1937. It was the last screenplay he wrote before he died, although two earlier works were found and made into films in the 40s. How sad. Lairdy, we hardly knew ye.
That aside, a fine Errol effort. When you see this early movie, you can see how and why the studio was crafting him to be a matinee idol, and why they succeeded. Good stuff, all around.
And if you thought Errol was a personal trainwreck, read the below about Another Dawn costar Kay Francis:
From the beginning, she was famed for being a clotheshorse, and though she hated the label, no one wore 'em like Kay. In Hollywood fashion history, Audrey Hepburn had the European tastefulness, Marlene Dietrich was the iconoclast in trousers, Julie Christie had the swingin' attitude, but Kay is tops in the Siren's book. She could wear even a ludicrous gown and make it seem chic. Given a truly elegant ensemble she could take your breath away. She was tall, slender and flat-chested, with a slight give-a-damn slouch that defied you to question why the hell she was wearing white in the middle of the Burmese jungle.
The picture you get in "Kay Francis: A Passionate Life and Career", by Lynn Kear and John Rossman, is melancholy. The authors make heavy use of Kay's diary, which was really more of a month-by-month calendar. But instead of just jotting down "buy bread" or "call mom," Kay used shorthand to note liquor consumption and all of her sexual conquests. That frequently filled up the margins, too, with entries like "Swell time but got very drunk. T[allulah] B[ankhead] called me a lesbian" and "We baptized the library floor. Good fucking" and "Slept with him and he may be the best of them all! Christ, I am a slut." (That possible best of them all, if you're interested, was agent Charles Feldman.) Her appetite, encompassing both men and women, was huge. She had four marriages but no children, opting instead for a jaw-dropping number of abortions. As a bit of social history, the ease with which well-connected, well-off Kay got abortions is telling; she had four the year she turned 23.
Several times the sheer volume of Kay's conquests made the Siren reach for a cold cloth to put on her forehead. (Even the authors say plaintively in the preface, "Believe it or not, we truly wanted to find out more about her career ... but the diary focused on her sex life.") Alas, nothing brought the actress much happiness. The book's Kay pursues pleasure but seldom finds it. Eventually the career withered and died, too, killed by public weariness with Kay's kind of pictures and blocked by the rise of a greater Warner star of the four-hanky saga, Bette Davis. Kay made no movies after 1946. In later years she drank too much, but retained a measure of her appeal even in bad times.
Actor-director Harold J. Kennedy ... described how Kay kept her sense of humor during one incident. 'I remember taking her one night to a little restaurant upstairs in the East Fifties when she fell down and it took three of us, the head waiter, the owner and myself, to carry her down the stairs and out into the street. The owner and the maitre d' were holding Kay slumped between them while I was trying to hail a cab when a young sailor went by and stared at her. "Is that Kay Francis?" he said. Kay half-opened her eyes and smiled that million-dollar smile. "I used to be," she said.'
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