Dinner with Laura Jacobs last night.
Almost out of the blue, she mentioned the 1932 movie Faithless and how moving Tallulah was in it. When I wrote Tallulah! I had to do almost a wholesale act of interpretative revisionism re: Bankhead’s spate of films in 1931-32, given how slightingly as well as superficially they’d been treated by critics after her death in 1968.
I agreed that she was moving in Faithless, and the movie itself is one of the frankest depictions of why and how women turn to prostitution. (She starts out rich and then suffers a long slide downward.)
I didn’t know that TCM had just shown it, and that Laura and her husband James Wolcott had seen it. Jim had tweeted this:
“If you want to see what an America w/o a safety net (the conservative wet dream) looks like, FAITHLESS (1932) will fill you in. #TCM.”