The Story of Temple Drake

Released pre-Code enforcement in 1933, The Story of Temple Drake is a ferociously fast-paced Cliff Notes version of Faulkner's sensationalistic best-seller Sanctuary.  Because of the novel's infamy, the film had to be renamed so as to avoid creating additional notoriety for the book.  In any event, the Catholic League of Decency protested and, the next year, measures began to enforce the Hay's Code that was on the books but more honored in the breach than the observance before 1934.  The movie plays as a series of brief vignettes chronicling the rape and prostitution of a misguided southern debutante, Temple Drake, here played by Miriam Hopkins.  Hopkins is palpably too old and jaded for the role, but, once these objections are overcome, she's about as good as you can be in the part.  The movie is clearly influenced by the Universal cycle of horror pictures and seems to have been designed for that market -- there's a ruined haunted house infested with depraved yokels and hillbilly gangsters all under the malign rule of a well-dressed suave thug named Trigger.  (The sequences in the decaying mansion parody James Whale's great The Old Dark House.)  The famous corn-crib rape scene in the book is staged with overtly expressionistic lighting effects and there are a number of reaction shots showing Temple peering through a shattered window while the lightning flashes behind her and rain and wind whips down from the black sky that could have been extracted from Universal monster movies by Tod Browning or James Whale.  The courtroom climax to the film is very effective and suspenseful although, of course, it traduces Faulkner's far more bitter and pessimistic ending.  Thought to be lost, the film was rediscovered in 2011 and has been exquisitely restored -- some of the shots are gorgeously lit; this is particularly true of the scene in which Temple kills her rapist/pimp Trigger and, then, stand horrified over his supine body.  The soundtrack is also perfectly clear, not the disfigured, tinny murmur often associated with films of this era and, contributing to the atmosphere, is an absence (mostly) of any orchestral accompaniment.  The director, someone named Steven Roberts, uses only about eight close-ups in the film but they are very beautiful and inserted exactly where necessary in order to heighten the conflict and suspense.

Temple Drake is a wild teenage girl living with her grandfather, a dignified local judge.  (Her father was killed in the First World War.)  She drinks, smokes cigarettes, and engages in petting with her various, gin-soaked and older boyfriends.  Her suitor is Steve Benbow, a virtuous if somewhat stiff and earnest lawyer committed to defending the rights of the underdog.  Benbow proposes to her but she rejects him, preferring to race around the backwoods in a car operated by one of her drunken boyfriends.  The car crashes and the stunned occupants stagger through a stormy, dark night to a ruinous ante-bellum mansion where Trigger and his depraved cohorts are holed-up.  Trigger is so savage that he shoots the whisky jug out of the hands of an old man said to be both "stone-deef and blind."  There's a drab, the abused girlfriend of one of the countrified gangsters -- she tends to a baby that is kept in a drawer "so that the rats don't get it."  Everyone is anxious to rape the comely Temple.  But Trigger reserves her to himself, locking her half-naked in a corn-crib:  there's a scream and, then, cut to black.  We see Temple next in a sporting house in "the City" -- either Memphis, I suppose, or New Orleans.  She's living with Trigger, looks dissolute, and wears silk lingerie.  Trigger has killed a retarded boy at the ruined mansion and one of the yokels, the father of the rat-imperiled infant, is accused of the crime.  Benbow is retained to defend the yokel.  He hunts down Temple and tries to subpoena her.  She pretends to love Trigger to keep the gangster from gunning down the lawyer.  After Benbow leaves, Temple tries to depart herself, gets beaten by Trigger, and, then, kills the mobster.  She rushes to the trial.  When she is on the stand, Benbow can't bring himself to disgrace her and withdraws the witness.  Then, Temple acts righteously, volunteering the evidence that both shames her and saves the man wrongly indicted man from the gallows.  (In the novel, Faulkner has Temple commit perjury and the innocent man is hanged.)  All of this is managed swiftly, effectively, and without undue melodrama.  The material is so lurid that the director manages the actors, if not the rather over-the-top mise-en-scene, so that they are relatively restrained in their performances.  Nonetheless, the scenes in which Temple finds herself alone with the depraved hillbillies, all of them mentally retarded or just pathologically vicious, reminded me in some ways of the ghastly stuff involving the family of depraved meat-packers in Tobe Hooper's original Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Films of this sort were shot quickly and there are a number of flaws.  The nasty boyfriend who gets Temple in trouble with the hillbillies just drops out of the  picture -- we see him at one point in a railroad luggage room or some place on this order but the scene doesn't really make sense.  (It is, however, evidence of Thirties racism, the African-American porter refers to the white man, although he's obviously and wretched and cowardly drunk, as "boss.")   Movies of this sort have some signature camera movements that often are intrusive, wobbly, and unnecessary -- a standard approach to some scenes is to start in a long shot and, then, dolly the camera toward the point of emphasis in a kind of swooping L-shaped motion.  The opening shot features this dolly, tracking inward on a lintel engraved with words "County Court" -- but the motion is pointless:  we can see the words perfectly clearly from the long shot.  There's a textbook example of a violation of the 180 degree rule early in the picture -- it actually makes you jump a little.  One sequence framed as shot/counter-shot shows the hero clearly lit; the heroine is shot in soft-focus and very dimly lit and so the viewer can't make sense of the images -- where is the light?  And why is it acting in this way?  But these are minor points and the film is very entertaining despite the compromises that it makes with Faulkner's source material.