Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 2-August-09
Spoiler Rating: High

Waterloo Bridge (1931)

The 1931 version of Waterloo Bridge is available as part of Turner Entertainment's "Forbidden Hollywood" collection. This series features racy movies which came out before the Hays Code put the kibosh on overt sexuality. The other half of the DVD, Red-Headed Woman, is such trash that it nearly makes a case for censorship. Yet Waterloo Bridge is another story.

In recent months I have been fascinated by the cavalier attitude old movies had towards prostitution, both before and after the Code. Perhaps more discomfited than fascinated: I had never fully considered that until women entered the workforce less than a century ago, a female needing cash had few other options, especially if her family and suitors were poor or nonexistent. This is the case with Myra (Mae Clarke), the tragic heroine of Waterloo Bridge. Having fled an abusive home in the States, she got by as a London chorus girl until World War I made work scarce and soldiers plentiful. Now she survives on the money they pay for her favors, although this is barely enough to cover rent on a shabby little room.

Directed with patience and compassion by James Whale (whom Ian McKellen memorably portrayed in Gods and Monsters), the film relates how Myra's eroded self-esteem prevents her from accepting the possibility of love and redemption. During an air raid one night, she meets a soldier named Roy (the excellent Kent Douglass) and takes him back to her place. Roy is 19 years old and very polite, and his innocence shames Myra into trying to drive him away. It is too late, however, since he has already fallen in love with her. He does not grasp that she walks the streets for a living (and she never tells him), but he does understand that she is lonely, frightened, and broke. The urge to rescue her fuels his passion.

Myra's struggle is gut-wrenching. Quite understandably, she longs to find relief in Roy's arms but fears to bring him disgrace, fearing also that she does not deserve to rise above her station. Her pain becomes acute when Roy brings her to his family's manor in the country where no chorus girl (or worse) has ever gone before. Everyone is so kind to her, so willing to look upon her as the girl Roy loves, that she confides her dirty secret to his mother and flees.

The ending of Waterloo Bridge, like that of so many fallen-women tales, is a poser. It could illustrate that love conquers all except war, or it could intimate that it is justly impossible for a slut to attain happiness. In either case the movie is a moving account of a woman who might really have existed — or any number of women, which makes it a bitter slice of life.

Copyright © 2009 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.