FRIENDS AND LOVERS

US, 1931, 68 minutes, Black and white.
Adolphe Menjou, Lily Damita, Laurence Olivier, Erich von Stroheim, Hugh Herbert.
Directed by Victor Scherzinger.

Friends and Lovers is a film from the early 1930s, rather stage bound in its presentation of scenes, relying on a great deal of dialogue, still working on sound engineering to make the transition from silent films to the talkies.

The plot of the film is quite melodramatic. A cavalier army seducer is having a relationship with the wife of a sinister, wealthy man. At the beginning of the film there is a confrontation between the two men, with the wealthy man, a collector of porcelain, blackmailing the seducer to pay him 5000 pounds. The husband had set his wife up to seduce for blackmail. The army man then goes to take up a post in India.

The army man is played by Adolf Menjou. He is assisted by a batman, played by the comedian, Hugh Herbert, who would later make a career out of his idiosyncratic facial mannerisms. Once in India, a friend of the captain is appointed as his assistant. When he arrives, it emerges that he too has a relationship with the femme fatale in London. The officer is played by Laurence Olivier at age 23. He does not quite give indications of the career that he would have and the stature that he would attain. The femme fatale is played by Lili Damita.

But, the standout is the presence Erich von Stroheim as the sinister husband. Von Stroheim had already directed silent films including Greed.

This means that the film is interesting as an archival memory of the transition from silent to sound, of the nature of screenplays and the need for their being “opened up (there is suggestion of an action sequence in India but it mainly happens off-screen). And it is probably more interesting to look at the cast and see them at this stage of their career in the light of what they were to achieve.

The morals of the film remind us that this was produced before the application of the Motion Picture Code in the early 1930s.