The coquettish granddaughter of a respected small-town judge is stranded at a bootleggers’ hide-out, subjected to an act of nightmarish sexual violence, and plunged into a criminal underworld that threatens to swallow her up completely.
Miriam Hopkins William Gargan Jack La Rue Florence Eldridge Guy Standing Irving Pichel Jobyna Howland William Collier Jr. Elizabeth Patterson James Eagles Harlan Knight James Pier Mason Louise Beavers Arthur Belasco Oscar Apfel Clem Beauchamp John Carradine Frank Darien Harold Goodwin Grady Sutton Kent Taylor
Levada à Força, Das Haus des Unheils, La déchéance de miss Drake, 可怜美玉陷泥淖, 템플 드레이크 이야기, 暴風の処女, Secuestro
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USA
“If he’d done her laundry, he’d know more about that child.”
Miriam Hopkins, back against the wall in a bed of corncobs, single handedly forcing the hand of the Hays Office to begin strict enforcement of the Production Code. A simplification, sure, but it's my truth. In reality there were half a dozen other “problem” films in 1933 that riled up the pro-censorship crowd and led to the hiring of Catholic influencer Joseph Breen, and the subsequent Code crackdown in July 1934.
Will Hays had forbid any studio from adapting Faulkner’s controversial novel, Sanctuary (“It is utterly unthinkable as a motion picture”). Still, his office had no bite in 1933 and Paramount bought the book rights anyways and started production,…
A southern judge's wild granddaughter's life goes completely off the rails when she gets involved with bootleggers.
This is a movie that letterboxd made me want to see, when I first joined the site and was wandering through page after page of lists and filmographies blown away by how user friendly it was compared to IMDB this film, or at least this poster, seemed to be everywhere. One of the ones you had to see to have a handle on 1930s Hollywood, which, however many Tsui Hark films I binge on, is probably my favourite period of movie making.
It's taken me a while, in fact I watched the first 20 minutes about 6 months ago having found it split…
Pungent Southern Gothic atmosphere, smelling of sin and vice. Stunning cinematography by Karl Struss (Sunrise). A full-throttle performance by Miriam Hopkins. Jack La Rue looking like a Dick Tracy villain come to life. Surprisingly ahead-of-its-time treatment of rape. 72 minutes. The ideal Pre-Code movie.
An absolute underrated classic. I can’t believe how shocking this must have been. I mean the book this is based off of (Sanctuary by William Faulkner) was highly controversial and Will Hays had objected to any adaption of it. It’s a really dark and gruesome tale about a rape and the trauma that comes with it, but it was so investing and frustrating as well.
Miriam Hopkins is phenomenal in the lead, conveying fear through her facial expressions and screams. Jack La Rue is brutal, but fantastic, sending chills down my spine anytime he appears on screen. Karl Struss’ cinematography is beautiful, taking advantage of the lighting and creating beautiful imagery in the process, and Stephen Robert’s’ direction is solid as well. I would say the only problem I had with it was the ending. It was pretty abrupt.
But, overall this is a masterpiece. Incredibly hard to watch, but so impactful and a must see.
I'm a sucker for Southern gothic melodrama, and this proved to be a particularly potent one. As a notorious example of Pre-Code, it deftly rode the line between classy and salacious. Miriam Hopkins was excellent in the title role, and this had some of the best cinematography that side of The Magnificent Ambersons. Even the courtroom finale was appropriate and well-executed. And that basically sums up my first impressions. This is one I see myself returning to multiple times (if I can only make some real progress on my ever-expanding collection).
I had a somewhat mixed response to this but the parts that worked were truly outstanding. A pre-code film that attracted a lot of notoriety, it's based on a William Faulkner 1932 novel “Sanctuary” that was so scandalous itself that it was toned down for the film, which wound up still very racy for its time.
It's also a truly outstanding role for Miriam Hopkins, always under-appreciated in my opinion. She plays Temple Drake, a privileged Southern girl and granddaughter of a judge. She's a sexual tease for most of the men in her circle (in the novel she's sexually active) and winds up at decrepit moonshiner's roadhouse where she's raped and then abducted by a gangster, becoming his sex…
Catholics writing the Hays Code watching this movie: “This one, this one right here officer.”
The best Southern Gothic undermines myths and titillates readers and viewers. It’s fueled by Degradation: economic, moral, architectural (“the gutted ruin rising gaunt and stark out of a grove of unpruned cedar trees known as the Old Frenchman place”), and most of all, degradation of the virtue of Southern maidenhood.
Faulkner was open about his deliberate attempt to write a trashy bestseller, and Sanctuary succeeded wildly in scandal-driven sales. Drunkenness, rape, murder, and a careless and privileged girl whose flirtatious games take her from the sorority house and land her first in a corn crib with a syphilitic bootlegger, then a Memphis bordello, and then on the witness stand. Faulkner skillfully delays and hides the most lurid of the details…
Hopkins is very good and it benefits from been made so close to Faulkner's novel, the movie for all its attempts to tame down Sactuary to a releaseble form still allow her situation to be felt in a way a more prestige later version couldn't. It is a shame La Rue gangster is so bland and that the third act plot mechanics settle so easy into a morality play despite Hopkins selling it as well as she can.
Aside from its status as a semi-notorious pre-Code Hollywood movie, this adaptation of William Faulkner's pulp-influenced 1931 novel Sanctuary isn't all that interesting. The tawdriest aspects of the novel have been toned down substantially and it seems too cute for what it is rather than signifying the real danger Temple Drake (Miriam Hopkins) is in. The pacing is uneven and it still has the marks of that transitional period as the silent films were giving way to "talkies." It does get points for having some fairly risque content for a 1933 movie (rape, sex trafficking, sex work) and for daring to adapt a Faulkner novel (even if it isn't one of his strongest from the period). In the end, this one is, for this viewer, more important than it is good.
Every time I watch a pre-code movie I can't help but wonder what would have happened in movies had the Hays Code not taken effect. What sort of movies would have been made by the great filmmakers in the decades that followed. How much violence would have been in a Hitchcock film? How much language in a Howard Hawks movie? How much sex in a Billy Wilder picture? Would things been all that different? I'm sure they would have, but how?
I'm not at all suggesting that the pre-code area was a free for all where there was no censorship. But the rules were looser and it was an environment where a movie like The Story of Temple Drake could…
This movie should really be given the genre label of "horror." While watching I had a chill down my spine, and after watching I can't stop thinking about how disturbing this film can get. This films uses everything that the medium allows--effective framing, sound, and brilliant performances all come together. Miriam Hopkins is especially great in this, and reminded me of just how talented she was as an actress. It makes sense that she's the standout here, but she deserves praise nonetheless.
A widely spread story is that George Raft initially was going to play Trigger, but he didn't want to because he felt people would forever associate him with that character. (I'm summarizing very simply here, so if I'm…
