HER MAN (1930) A dozen comedians & Helen Twelvetrees

[Ed Watz]

My Dad once told me that when he was a kid in the 1930s he hated to see anything with Sylvia Sidney or Helen Twelvetrees - because in their movies they were always in big trouble, crying almost constantly, getting arrested on false charges, or going to prison.

HER MAN (1930) starring Helen Twelvetrees, Ricardo Cortez and that muy macho manly-manly he-man Phillips Holmes, is a bit different.

In the very first scene, we get a classic cameo bit with Hank Mann, immediately followed by a sneering Richard Cramer, and soon afterwards come Stanley Fields, Thelma Todd, James Gleason, Harry Sweet, Franklin Pangborn, Slim Summerville, Vince Barnett, Frank Brownlee, Pat Harmon, Edgar Dearing, Neely Edwards, Bud Jamison...and just maybe in the fight scene Bobby Barber, among others.

https://youtu.be/AnCfXJckDRk?si=fnVD9MeIdEiHmucG

Quick postscript to Misses Twelvetrees and Sidney:

Raymond Rohauer decorated the walls of his apartment with film industry photographs in which he appeared with the great, the near great, and the not-so-great. In a photo from 1950 he is seated at a restaurant table with a sad-faced Helen Twelvetrees, who is averting her eyes from the camera. Rohauer tried to persuade the fading actress to appear in a stage production he was hoping to sponsor but things didn’t work out. Tragically Helen Twelvetrees committed suicide in 1958 at age 49.

Sylvia Sidney lived well into the 1990s and had a successful comeback appearing in TV shows and films like the cult sci-fi comedy MARS ATTACKS! near the end of her long life. When I saw her at Cinecon around that time, she appeared the opposite of her 1930s innocent persona, behaving very badly towards poor Leonard Maltin. I told my Dad this when I returned to New York. He replied, “Wow, she was a really good actress in the thirties then, to always come across so helpless!"