• Ann Dvorak and Lee Tracy in The Strange Love of Molly Louvain, which screens tomorrow at the Patio Theater

As we reported on Friday, tomorrow night marks the Patio Theater’s last screening for the foreseeable future, as the Northwest Chicago Film Society will present a 35-millimeter print of The Strange Love of Molly Louvain (1932). This crime drama doesn’t have much of a reputation today, even though it was directed by Michael Curtiz and produced by Warner Brothers, which made some of the roughest and toughest pre-Code features. In other words, it’s a characteristic choice for NCFS, which has come to specialize in unearthing rare gems of American movie history. Tomorrow’s screening will be introduced by Christina Rice, author of a recent biography of the movie’s star, Ann Dvorak. Like Molly Louvain, Dvorak slipped through the cracks of Hollywood lore, despite having appeared in a number of hits in the 1930s. (Rice will also introduce the most famous of these, Howard Hawks’s Scarface at the Pickwick Theatre on Thursday.) As I learned from Rice when we spoke the other day, Dvorak enjoyed a fascinating personal life in addition to a lengthy screen career. You can expect to learn more if you attend one of this week’s screenings.

What inspired you to write a biography of Dvorak?

  • Dvorak (right) in Three on a Match

My single favorite thing I found out about Ann was that, in the 1960s, she wrote an 18-volume history of the world and recorded an audiobook of it. She called it Historical Digest. Her goal was to market it to universities as a teaching aid. Either it no longer exists or I have yet to find it. But I love that she very earnestly embarked upon this project.

Gossip columnists could be really invasive in that era. I believe new laws were put in place as a result of this, to place certain limits on the paparazzi.

In Three on a Match, she goes, in the course of an hour, from being this sophisticated, high-society woman to a shriveling mess of a drug addict. She just allowed herself to look like hell, like Bette Davis did in Of Human Bondage. There’s this desperation and intensity to her that’s very convincing, even on a physical level. You don’t see that often in Hollywood films, particularly at that time. Her screen presence was just very unexpected.