Nothing But The Truth 1929

[Shawna Erholm]

NothingBut the Truth is a 1929 American pre-Code sound comedy film starring Richard Dix, loosely adapted from the play by James Montgomery and the 1914 novel of the same title by Frederic S. Isham. The play was adapted again (more faithfully) as Nothing But the Truth (1941) starring Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard.[1]

Robert Bennett (Richard Dix) is a stockbroker who is very carefree with other people's money. Encouraging clients to buy stocks in companies that are failing is all in a day's work to him. His fiance Gwenn Burke (Dorothy Hall) has to raise $40,000 for a charity project, comes to him with $10,000 to invest from her charity group, and wants him to double it within five days.

Meanwhile, E. M. Burke (Berton Churchill), Frank Connelly (Louis John Bartels), and Clarence Van Dyke (Ned Sparks) bet Bennett they will pay him each $10,000 if he tells the truth for 24 hours. The men later go to a nightclub where they meet Sabel and Mabel Jackson (Wynne Gibson and Helen Kane), who are a gold-digging sister act.

Mabel Jackson sings Do Something. After the show, the sisters ask Mr. Burke to back their show for them. They are determined to hold Burke to his promise to finance their idea for a show and won't take no for an answer. They hold all the cards, as they have managed to enter Burke's home and refuse to leave without the cash. Mrs. Burke (Madeline Grey) learns from Robert that her husband had promised to back the sisters' show, which makes her furious. Robert continues to answer every question truthfully; his fiance Dorothy asks him if he loves her and what he has done with all the money, he tells her the answer without telling a lie. By 4pm, Robert has won the $40,000 by telling the truth.

Game six exposed the hole and now it needed filled. Red Sox fans did not yet know it, but a quick fix that filled the breach and eased the pain was on its way. Two nights later in the Shea Stadium press box, as Mets fans celebrated and Sox fans started a winter hangover, a twisted logic to explain their loss rapidly evolved.

Ford believed his business success qualified him for national office. He lusted for a bully pulpit to lead a return to the traditional values he helped destroy. In 1916 the Democratic Party placed his name in nomination for the presidency and in 1918 Ford narrowly lost a campaign for the U.S. Senate representing Michigan.

Yet his International Jew series was intellectually bogus, based on hate, innuendo, rumor, distortion and lies. In regard to Harry Frazee, the Episcopalian and Mason, the Independent was, in fact, dead wrong on all counts.

In 1916 Harry Frazee produced a hit play entitled Nothing But The Truth, which eventually ran for 332 performances. The cleverly written comedy (later a film of the same name starring Bob Hope) featured an artifice as old as the theater itself, for the thinly veiled morality play considered the consequences of always telling the truth. The play struck an immediate chord with New Yorkers, for it took place in a brokerage house at a time period when even tradesmen and clerks were beginning to dabble in the stock market.

The story of Harry Frazee and the Red Sox should have come to an end. After his death in 1929 Frazee should have become a footnote in Red Sox history like previous owners Charles Somers, William Killilea, James McAleer and Joe Lannin.

The portrait Lieb paints is shrewd, yet once one is aware of it, unmistakable. He turns Frazee into a caricature with obvious Jewish overtones. [Note: For space reasons, much of the following six or eight paragraphs were excised by my editors at the time of publication.]

My heart is like a singing bird

Whose nest is in a water'd shoot;

My heart is like an apple tree

Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit,

My heart is like a rainbow shell

That paddles in a halcyon sea;

My heart is gladder than all these

Because my love is come to me.

At any rate, whether or not the blame rested on the old lady whowas looking at the spaniel, there could be no doubt that for somereason or other our mothers had mismanaged their affairs verygravely. Not a penny could be spared for 'amenities'; forpartridges and wine, beadles and turf, books and cigars, librariesand leisure. To raise bare walls out of bare earth was the utmostthey could do.

Here I drew breath and added, indeed, in the margin, Why doesSamuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'?Wise men never say anything else apparently. But, I continued,leaning back in my chair and looking at the vast dome in which Iwas a single but by now somewhat harassed thought, what is sounfortunate is that wise men never think the same thing aboutwomen. Here is Pope:

For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of thatextraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, wascapable of song or sonnet. What were the conditions in which womenlived? I asked myself; for fiction, imaginative work that is, isnot dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be;fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps,but still attached to life at all four corners. Often theattachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, forinstance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when theweb is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, oneremembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporealcreatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and areattached to grossly material things, like health and money and thehouses we live in.

A very queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she isof the highest importance; practically she is completelyinsignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is allbut absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings andconquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whoseparents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspiredwords, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall fromher lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell,and was the property of her husband.

That woman, then, who was born with a gift of poetry in thesixteenth century, was an unhappy woman, a woman at strife againstherself. All the conditions of her life, all her own instincts,were hostile to the state of mind which is needed to set freewhatever is in the brain. But what is the state of mind that ismost propitious to the act of creation? I asked. Can one come byany notion of the state that furthers and makes possible thatstrange activity? Here I opened the volume containing the Tragediesof Shakespeare. What was Shakespeare's state of mind, for instance,when he wrote Lear and Antony and Cleopatra? It wascertainly the state of mind most favourable to poetry that therehas ever existed. But Shakespeare himself said nothing about it. Weonly know casually and by chance that he 'never blotted a line'.Nothing indeed was ever said by the artist himself about his stateof mind until the eighteenth century perhaps. Rousseau perhapsbegan it. At any rate, by the nineteenth century self-consciousnesshad developed so far that it was the habit for men of letters todescribe their minds in confessions and autobiographies. Theirlives also were written, and their letters were printed after theirdeaths. Thus, though we do not know what Shakespeare went throughwhen he wrote Lear, we do know what Carlyle went throughwhen he wrote the French Revolution; what Flaubert wentthrough when he wrote Madame Bovary; what Keats was goingthrough when he tried to write poetry against the coming death andthe indifference of the world.

And this susceptibility of theirs is doubly unfortunate, Ithought, returning again to my original enquiry into what state ofmind is most propitious for creative work, because the mind of anartist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing wholeand entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent, likeShakespeare's mind, I conjectured, looking at the book which layopen at Antony and Cleopatra. There must be no obstacle init, no foreign matter unconsumed.

That one would find any woman in that state of mind in thesixteenth century was obviously impossible. One has only to thinkof the Elizabethan tombstones with all those children kneeling withclasped hands; and their early deaths; and to see their houses withtheir dark, cramped rooms, to realize that no woman could havewritten poetry then. What one would expect to find would be thatrather later perhaps some great lady would take advantage of hercomparative freedom and comfort to publish something with her nameto it and risk being thought a monster. Men, of course, are notsnobs, I continued, carefully eschewing 'the arrant feminism' ofMiss Rebecca West; but they appreciate with sympathy for the mostpart the efforts of a countess to write verse. One would expect tofind a lady of title meeting with far greater encouragement than anunknown Miss Austen or a Miss Bront at that time would havemet with. But one would also expect to find that her mind wasdisturbed by alien emotions like fear and hatred and that her poemsshowed traces of that disturbance. Here is Lady Winchilsea, forexample, I thought, taking down her poems. She was born in the year1661; she was noble both by birth and by marriage; she waschildless; she wrote poetry, and one has only to open her poetry tofind her bursting out in indignation against the position ofwomen:

Alas! a woman that attempts the pen,

Such a presumptuous creature is esteemed,

The fault can by no virtue be redeemed.

They tell us we mistake our sex and way;

Good breeding, fashion, dancing, dressing, play,

Are the accomplishments we should desire;

To write, or read, or think, or to enquire,

Would cloud our beauty, and exhaust our time,

And interrupt the conquests of our prime.

Whilst the dull manage of a servile house

Is held by some our utmost art and use.

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