The Story of Temple Drake (1933)

Director: Stephen Roberts                            Writer: Oliver H.P. Garrett
Film Score: Bernhard Kaun                          Cinematography: Karl Struss
Starring: Miriam Hopkins, William Gargan, Florence Eldridge and Irving Pichel

Based on his popular novel Sanctuary, published in 1931, this is a bit of Southern Gothic from William Faulkner. The Story of Temple Drake stars Miriam Hopkins as a young girl who likes to tease boys. But when her childhood sweetheart, William Gargan, wants to marry her she refuses because she knows she’ll only cause him heartache in the end. One night she leaves a party with a drunk college boy and they crash the car on a lonely country road. When they are found they are taken back to a ruined plantation house full of poor white trash. Bootlegger Irving Pichel is making liquor for his gangster client, Jack La Rue. Early the next morning La Rue kills the dimwitted boy who keeps spying on him and then rapes Hopkins. Unbelievably, that’s when the real horror starts. Apparently Faulkner was dissatisfied with the sales of his more literary novels and had the idea to write something sensational that would make a lot of money. He succeeded, as Sanctuary remains his best selling novel.

Miriam Hopkins, though a wonderful actress, seems a bit miscast here. She always seemed to have the upper hand in films like Trouble in Paradise, and seeing her as the victim is a bit hard to believe. Even so, she does a nice job and has some powerful moments. Her first love in the film, William Gargan, made dozens of films in the thirties and played the detective Ellery Queen in a series of pictures for Columbia in the forties. Jack La Rue was sort of a second string gangster, losing out roles to Paul Muni in Scarface and Humphrey Bogart in The Petrified Forest. When the great Irving Pichel reports the murder he is instantly arrested and charged. Gargan is the public defender who pleads with him to tell the truth, but he refuses to testify against La Rue for fear of being killed in reprisal. Florence Eldridge plays Irving Pichel’s bitter wife, and does a fantastic job, a beautiful woman who has been beaten down.

The film is definitely pre-code, dealing with the theme of abduction and rape. In fact, "Shame" was the original title, not "Story." With Hopkins undressing early in the film and later being beaten by La Rue, it’s a pretty potent mix of sex and violence. In his fantastic book on the period, Pre-Code Hollywood, by Thomas Doherty, he tells how even screen gangster George Raft, then under contract with Paramount, refused to do the picture in the La Rue role, calling it, “screen suicide.” Had the film been more definitive--though I still think it’s clear--that Hopkins had no real way of escaping from La Rue, and had there been a scene or two showing her suffering from the forced prostitution, it probably would have been more satisfying. As it is, there’s a certain disappointment one feels at the end of the picture that’s hard to escape. It’s a short film, too, at seventy-five minutes, which makes sense. The Story of Temple Drake, for all it’s pre-code infamy, winds up feeling like an unfinished picture.