"A Woman Commands" 1931 FOWLER, Guy (SOLD)
Price on Request
FOWLER, Guy
[239] pp.
Grosset & Dunlap
1931
7 5/8" x 5 3/8"
Jacket artwork by Mach Tey Styka
Photo-illustrated with stills from the film. Based on the 1932 film, directed Paul L. Stein, and starring Roland Young, Basil Rathbone, and Pola Negri, appearing in her first Hollywood film and first talkie after a brief retirement in 1928.
Photoplay edition (actually, in this case, the true first edition) of this tale of an exotic cabaret dancer who opportunistically throws over her lover to marry a king, but whose life (and the king's) is then complicated by a revolution, among the leaders of which is her scorned lover. (In the movie, the king was played by Roland Young and the lover by Basil Rathbone, the latter a replacement for the originally-cast Laurence Olivier, who (it was reported) was sidelined by a "refractory appendix," whatever that means.) Per a statement on the title page, this 1932 RKO release (instigated under the RKO-Pathe banner, but taken over in a merger too complicated to explain here) marked "the return to the American screen of Pola Negri," a publicity factoid further promoted by the reproduction, opposite the frontispiece photo, of a letter from La Negri herself, in which she states that she has "pledged [herself] to give to this role the best that it is me and it is my hope that in interpreting the character of a woman with lofty ambitions and high ideals, I have not failed." The Polish-born actress, who came to Hollywood in 1922 on the strength of her appearances in a number of Ernst Lubitsch's German-made epics, had gone into a brief "retirement" from the screen in 1928, after marrying her second husband; by the following year, however, she was already working again, appearing in one last silent film, a 1929 British feature entitled THE WOMAN HE SCORNED, directed by German director Paul Czinner. Her subsequent return to America in this film (also her first talkie), however, was less than triumphant, and she promptly "retired" again for a few years before making a spate of European films (one in France, six in Germany) in the mid-to-late 1930s. Although A WOMAN COMMANDS wasn't a hit, its theme song, "Paradise" (sung by Negri) was, and its popularity was enough to launch her on a successful vaudeville tour.