The Story of Temple Drake

I am fascinated by the films of the pre-Code era that are often seen as being what brought on the Hays Code. Not that pre-Code Hollywood was some wild, lawless land of movies with full frontal nudity, graphic violence, and lurid themes, but it did have some movies that rubbed hard against the sensibilities of the times. That makes watching them 90-plus years later so interesting. What was scandalous then (Baby Face’s main character shamelessly sleeping her way to the top of a company, for instance) would be a PG-13 at best. But that also makes a movie from that era hard to judge. The shock value is gone, so it has to be judged strictly on its merits. And that’s where The Story Of Temple Drake falls down for me, because in the end, it’s just a morality play. Hell, in many ways, it’s the same story as Hitchcock’s Easy Virtue: a free-spirited woman, through a series of events, is humiliated in the public court and stripped of her dignity and stature in the end. Temple doesn’t seem to hate its own protagonist as much as Easy Virtue did, but it doesn’t change the fact that, when all is said and done, the lead character Temple Drake is punished in a roundabout way for being a free, independent woman who dares to enjoy things like dancing and men and alcohol. All she does is get in trouble by circumstance, and somehow, society gets to bring her to heel for it. It is by the virtue of lead actor Miriam Hopkins that the movie is watchable at all. She has a fire and energy that give Temple — the movie and the character — some blood in its veins. Without her, this would be outdated shock theater and a heavy-handed finger-wagging at a young woman for having a mind of her own. Which it still is, but she makes it tolerable. But tolerable isn’t a high bar to clear, and Temple struggles to do that. The descriptions I’ve read make it sound like a borderline horror movie, but it’s the furthest thing from. I can see how it ruffled feathers in the early 30’s, but 90 years later, it’s a relic, and not a particularly interesting one.