the story of temple drake (stephen roberts, 1933)

I'm taking on another challenge. This one is The Criterion Challenge 2025. It's the fifth annual, my first try. "There are 52 categories. The goal is to watch any Criterion released film based on the categories ... between 1/1/25-12/31/25." There is no specified order, so I'll watch them as I get to them. Today's category is Criterion Releases Never Picked in the Closet.

I was surprised to find The Story of Temple Drake to be the kind of film where it's almost more interesting to talk about its surroundings than about the film itself. The most recent one I watched was Dead & Buried ... when I wrote about it, I mentioned the big-but-not-yet famous names behind the scenes, a cast of former TV "stars" and a future horror icon, and finally, after I'd used up my anecdotes, I said a few words about the movie, which wasn't very good.

The Story of Temple Drake has a lot of those "behind the scenes" stories. It's known as a pre-Code film that is in some ways blamed for the ultimate strengthening of the Code ... Temple Drake went so far, Hollywood had to do something. It was based on the Faulkner novel Sanctuary, set in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi. There are stories that Faulkner wrote it because he knew it would be popular ... I guess he was tired of waiting for the general public to fall in love with As I Lay Dying. Wikipedia has some choice quotes. "Most reviews described the book as horrific and said that Faulkner was a very talented writer. Some critics also felt that he should write something pleasant for a change.... Faulkner once headed a troop of Boy Scouts but the administrators removed him from his position after the release of the book." There was rape with a corncob, syphilis, impotence, prostitution, and lots of extreme drinking during Prohibition. The book was a hit, and so the idea was proposed that it be turned into a movie. Yeah, right. Cartwheels were turned to stuff the events of the novel into acceptable form, but even then, The Story of Temple Drake was scandalous ... popular, but scandalous. George Raft had been offered the male lead, a gangster, but he turned it down because even George Raft worried his career would be ruined if he played such a worthless character (the part was taken by Jack La Rue).

And here is where the film enters history. With the final tightening of the Code, any pre-Code movie with "unacceptable" scenes would have those scenes edited out before the movie could be re-released. Often, the parts that were edited out were destroyed by the studios, leaving lots of mangled pictures for future film historians. But The Story of Temple Drake was so beyond what was allowed that editing out one scene was never going to be enough. So no editing was done, it just was never re-released. The movie essentially disappeared, for almost 80 years. But when the Code was long gone, lo and behold, there was Temple Drake, unmangled. So the version we see today is the correct one.

Usually with movies like this, I end by pointing out the film is poor. But in fact, The Story of Temple Drake is excellent. Miriam Hopkins is at her 30s best in the title role, and La Rue is marvelously scary. The use of close ups was extensive and added to the terrifying nature of what we were seeing. There were some fine films from Hollywood in 1933, and Temple Drake stands with them, perhaps best-paired in a double-bill with Design for Living, which also starred Hopkins. What a delight to finally encounter this film.