The Squall

I watched this film mainly because of Myrna Loy and Loretta Young. Although the storyline is rather silly and the acting seems over-emotional and trivial today, the movie still has its very own charm. It might not be a milestone in film history, but it has its funny moments, mostly unintentional, simply from the way it has been made - such as the idea of rural Hungary in the 1920s with open jewel shops in the middle of the night. But it is a true delight to watch Loretta Young and especially Myrna Loy in one of their early films. Myrna totally stole the show from the rest of the cast - even though her lines were as silly as the rest of the dialogue and her part of the gypsy girl is so stereotypical it seems sort of racist today. Still, she made the most out of it and kept me watching through the whole two hours runtime. I even felt kind of sorry that later on in her career she didn't play any sassy villains anymore. Surprisingly well done was the music score, far better than the dialogue. Perhaps they had better made it a silent picture. So if you watch this movie as one of the first talkies and don't focus on the storyline too much, you might still enjoy this old 'treasure'.

This is a tale of a prosperous Hungarian farming family that takes in a gypsy girl (Myrna Loy as Nubi) who says she has run away from her tribe and will be beaten by her gypsy husband if reclaimed. They hide her, take her into their home as a servant, and come to regret that decision.

Although directed by the renowned Alexander Korda, he did a poor job here, possibly not having veto power over the diction coaches in this very early talkie. This is Loretta Young's first talkie and it shows. She is very good at conveying emotion, but she probably is the most wooden member of the cast in speaking her lines. In her next surviving talkie, "Loose Ankles", she has improved tremendously. ZaSu Pitts is endearing, what little we get to see of her. As dizzy and well-meaning as ever as servant girl Lena, she is captivating even under all of those peasant petticoats.

After watching Nubi laze around the house not doing her work, seducing all the men of the house to the point she has the servant man singing a ballad to a bovine, and enticing the son in the house, Paul, to steal Lena's life savings to buy her an expensive necklace you've got to wonder - Why didn't they just throw the dame out? The parents had to have figured that Paul's allowance disappearing and Nubi practically slumping from all of that fancy jewelry she was suddenly wearing had to have some correlation.

I have seen some early talkies that are poorly paced, but this one should hold your interest, if only from the standpoint of watching the clean-up of a multi-vehicle accident from which you cannot turn away. There is one interesting rather precode line spoken by the father to the mother when talking about Nubi carrying on with Paul. The mother believes Paul has stopped paying attention to his fiancée because he is in love with Nubi. Dad is more insightful - "Paul is not interested in love, he's interested in sex!"

Recommended, if only to see how Loretta Young and Myrna Loy started out in talking pictures.

No one is going to mistake The Squall for a good movie, but it sure is a memorable one. Once you've witnessed Myrna Loy's performance as Nubi the hot-blooded gypsy girl you're not likely to forget the experience. When this film was made the exotically beautiful Miss Loy was still being cast as foreign vixens, often Asian and usually sinister. She's certainly an eyeful here. It appears that her skin was darkened and her hair was curled. In most scenes she's barefoot and wearing little more than a skirt and a loose-fitting peasant blouse, while in one scene she wears nothing but a patterned towel. I'm focusing on Miss Loy's appearance because she is by far the best if not the only reason to tune in to this antiquated early talkie and to stick with it. You sure won't be held by the dialog, which is hopeless. In one typical passage, Nubi gazes out the window at the departing caravan and waxes poetic: "Always the gypsies, they sing. Weird and sad. When the big sun have breath of fire that burn, and when the pale moon look from behind cloud and breathe air cold as death, they sing." Poetic, or what? Lovers of purple prose will have a field day. I can't help but wonder, however, if in her later years Miss Loy preferred to forget her involvement with this project.

Like so many early talkies this one was an adaptation of a Broadway success. The stage version opened at the 48th Street Theatre in November of 1926 and ran for over a year. The play provoked a famous episode involving the humorist and theater critic Robert Benchley, who had a well-known aversion to characters who spoke in thick dialect or pidgin English. According to a much-repeated anecdote Mr. Benchley squirmed uncomfortably through the opening portion of this show. The Spanish village setting (which became a village in Hungary for the movie, for some reason) gave the actors license to practice accents with varying degrees of success, but Benchley's patience reached its limit when, during a family dinner sequence, a door burst open and an actress dressed as a gypsy girl dashed into the room shouting "Help! Help! He keel me!" She then threw herself at the feet of the mistress of the household and exclaimed "Me Nubi! Me good girl! Me stay here!" At that point Mr. Benchley rose and announced to his companion: "Me Bobby. Me bad boy. Me go now," and left the theater.

The film version offers numerous examples of unintended humor but never approaches Benchley's level of wit. The melodramatic plot concerns the Lajos family: father Josef, mother Maria, and son Paul, a student at the nearby college. We would consider this prosperous family "upper-middle class" as they are landowners with servants and all the comforts of life, but their comfortable existence is abruptly thrown into turmoil when a gypsy caravan arrives in the village and their home is invaded by, yes, Nubi the nubile gypsy girl. She arrives at their door during the storm of the title-- symbolizing stormy emotions, I daresay. The girl is fleeing an abusive relationship and begs for sanctuary. After considering the matter the Lajos family agrees to hide her from her angry lover, who shows up shortly afterward but is turned away. Nubi becomes a servant in the household. Kindness motivated the family's decision to take her in, but soon enough that conniving little Nubi pays them back by seducing every able-bodied male in the vicinity, starting with the Lajos' servant Peter, then working her way up to son Paul. Nubi breaks up Paul's relationship with his fiancé Irma (played by Loretta Young, still a teenager), causes him to flunk out of school, and then prompts him to buy jewelry for her by stealing the savings of the family's maid Lena (ZaSu Pitts). Lena, for her part, is still mourning the loss of her own fiancé Peter, seduced and tossed aside by Nubi when she turned her attentions to Paul. Ultimately Nubi sets her sights on the patriarch Josef, and I suppose if the running time had been longer she also would've gone after Uncle Dani, Maria, the village priest and God knows who else.

I guess it goes without saying that a scenario like this one easily lends itself to parody, but even so during its first half The Squall exerts the undeniable fascination of a daytime soap: we watch, hypnotized, as the Bad Girl works her spell on the men-folk and wreaks havoc like an irresistible force of nature, almost like-- a storm! Ah-ha, another metaphor! But as the plot machinations grind onward the campy fun fades. During the later scenes we see less of Nubi as the focus switches to the dysfunctional dynamics of the Lajos family, and frankly after a while these people get to be a real drag. The son in particular behaves like an absolute heel, yet the parents never acknowledge this or face up to their own shortcomings; everything, we're told, is the fault of Nubi, that no-good tramp.

The men of the cast are dull. Aside from Miss Loy the only actress who rises to the occasion is ZaSu Pitts, terrific as usual. The mother of the Lajos household is played by Alice Joyce, a longtime silent star who seemed out of her element with speaking roles, and who retired soon after this. Loretta Young's fresh prettiness provides a nice contrast to Nubi's dusky allure, but her line readings are so awkward it's kind of endearing. No, there's only one reason to watch this flick, and that's Nubi herself. I can't think of another actress who could've played this silly role and managed to come off half as well. I'm not an objective observer, however. I have a desperate crush on Myrna Loy and will watch her in anything, even The Squall.

Squall, The (1929)

* (out of 4)

Extremely bad melodrama should only be viewed if you must see everything that Myrna Loy and Loretta Young appeared in. Set in Hungary, a rich farming family has everything going great until they take in an abused gypsy girl (Loy) who turns out to be sex crazed and starts ruining everyone's relationships including that of the youngest daughter (Young). I'm not sure where to start so I'll just comment that this film is pretty horrid from start to finish but thankfully it's horrid enough to gain a few laughs. Apparently this was also released as a silent and I wouldn't mind watching that version because the performances in this sound edition are quite horrid and it's easy to tell that everyone is acting as if they were in a silent feature. The acting is so over-dramatic and over the top that you can't help but laugh and quite often you'll be scratching your head wondering what they hell everyone is being so dramatic for when it's not even necessary. Loy is incredibly bad in her role of the gypsy girl and I'm going to guess that she's never been worse. Young comes off so-so but then again she isn't acting against anything good. Richard Tucker turns in one of the worst performances I've ever seen and that might be being too nice. The film might be of interest to bad film buffs but otherwise this thing is worthless. It's drags on way too long as well, which doesn't help matters.

As Hollywood was making its transition from silent pictures to talkies, 1929 is left as a year full of oddities and curios. The Squall is a 100% talking picture and is one of the more watchable talkies from 1929. While watching The Squall or any other talkie from 1929 one must take into account the movie was presumably filmed with a camera in a soundproof box. It's evident the actors in The Squall have been heavily coached by diction experts and instructed to say their line as clearly and enunciated as possible - a scenario which anyone who has watched Singin' In the Rain will be familiar with. Likewise, none of the actors turn their heads when speaking to avoid going off-mike nor at any point do any of the cast simultaneously walk and talk.

So while none of the performances in The Squall bar one certain screen siren are anything to write home about, the production values are surprisingly very high. The Squall was directed by famed Hungarian-British producer and director Alexander Korda. I can only speculate if the director's heritage is the reason why the film takes place in Hungary whereas the play the film is based on is set in Granada, Spain. The sets and costumes are very detailed in this upper, middle-class Hungarian farm from what I assume is around the turn of the century. Complete with grand windmills, herds of animals, farm equipment and some nice miniature work, the film succeeds in creating an atmosphere. Just as significant in an unusual move for films right up until the early 1930s, is the use of a music score throughout the entire picture, suitably a heightened and melodramatic one to accommodate the sound effects of blustering storms.

However, the real reason to watch The Squall and the film's saving grace is the one and only Myrna Loy in the overacting triumph of her long and varied career as the scruffy, barefooted gypsy girl Nubi. The gloriously, melodramatic performance sees this seductress manipulate three men in the same household as she tears the once idyllic Lajos family apart. Particularly pathetic is the son Paul (Carroll Nye), an utter simp who buys jewellery for Nubi from money he stole from his parents. I can watch Myrna Loy in just about anything thus I can easily buy into the destructive charm of Nubi as she over emotes in broken English and always referring to herself in the third person - even in one early scene as Nubi proclaims "no more!", it appears as if Myrna Loy is trying to hold back her laughter. The contrast to the vampish Myrna Loy is the purity and innocence of a wide-eyed Loretta Young as Irma, a mere 16 years old at the time.

It should come as no surprise for a film as melodramatic at The Squall to play big with its use of symbolism and metaphor. The film's opening shot features a Christian cross overlooking the farm and during a dinner the family has near the film's beginning, the grandfather states that squalls are the work of God that he "gives us shadows that we may know light. He gives us sorrow that we may know joy. And perhaps he sends the squall that we may learn the beauty of a limpid sky". Nubi, of whom arrives at the family home during the midst of a storm, takes advantage of the Christian principle of sheltering the poor and homeless only to wreak havoc - an evil spirit if there ever was one.