With a script written by playwright Lawrence Hazard, the repartee of Frank Borzage’s 1937 film, Mannequin (pre-dating the one Andrew McCarthy would star in fifty years later in 1987), blends the dramatic elements of stage with the comedic timing of the 1930s era in cinema. Still set amid the dirge of the United States’ economy during the Great Depression, Jessie Cassidy (Joan Crawford), who has always been accustomed to working from a young age, seeks desperately to escape the poverty-stricken environment of her family’s ramshackle on the Lower East Side (at Hester Street and Eldridge Street)–now difficult to imagine for many in its present condo-fied state.
So eager to leave the apartment she feels is infecting her with its “down in the gutter” vibes to the point that she might never be able to shake them, she confuses a romance with fellow guttersnipe Eddie Miller (Alan Curtis) for true love–despite his glaring predilection for petty crimes like gambling and larceny. She is assured enough in her feelings to beg Eddie for them to get married sooner than planned, as though it is he who would be doing her a favor, when it’s clearly the other way around. For Jessie is the one who keeps working a job that will support both of them. While she was dating Eddie, she was a seamstress, and Eddie had promised her that she could quit, only to set her up with a gig as a chorus girl after they’re married instead.
It is the night of their wedding, while celebrating at a restaurant in the neighborhood, that John L. Hennessey (Spencer Tracy) just so happens to feel obliged to come around his old haunt despite being a wealthy, self-made entrepreneur who rose from the gutter of the LES to become a shipping magnate. Spotting the newlyweds from his table, he sends them a bottle of champagne, feeling a pang of nostalgia not only for his roots, but for a woman that might look at him the same way Jessie looks at Eddie.
In fact, he seems to want that exact woman to look at him the same way after Eddie practically drools all over the prospect of talking to Hennessey so that he might get something out of him. Offering up Jessie for a dance, remarking to his new wife that the man “ain’t blind” and would surely enjoy to cozy up with her, it’s as though Eddie is trying to make some trade between them. If that isn’t one of the first most glaring signs of his lack of reciprocal feelings for Jessie, then one doesn’t know what is. Of course, Jessie is too naive to see Eddie for what he is. It takes many more hardships, lies and affronts for Jessie to at last walk out on him. Indeed, the very thing that makes her walk out is the suggestion on Eddie’s part that she marry Hennessey for his money, then get a divorce and split the dough between them.
Disgusted and taking her mother’s previous advice that she’s perfectly capable of making it outside of Hester Street on her own, she finds a job as a mannequin (a.k.a. the French word for model) at an upper crust “salon” on Park Avenue. All the while, Hennessey has never stopped thinking about her and the brief encounters they shared (one during which he managed to steal a kiss). Nor has Eddie stopped thinking about his scam, which is precisely why he shows up to John’s penthouse to tell him where Jessie is working now (since the private detective Hennessey hired to find her doesn’t seem to be of any help).
In a classic case of old movies parading stalker-y behavior as “romantic,” Hennessey shows up to the fashion show unannounced, asking her out every time she passes by in a different outfit. Naturally, despite her barrage of “no’s”, she eventually agrees (further solidifying the “no means try harder” mentality that men were indoctrinated with for so long). At dinner, he is so bold as to ask her to marry him, confessing that he knows it must be hard for a woman to be asked such a thing when she isn’t in love with the man asking.
And yet, Hennessey is so head over heels, he tells her that he wouldn’t care if she didn’t love him, because he could love enough for the both of them. Sweet, that logic, if not completely ill-advised. Luckily for Hennessey, Jessie starts to come around during their European honeymoon (surely that luxe life must have had something to do with finally falling for him). All the while, however, she knows that Eddie is lurking in the background, waiting to threaten her and her true love by blackmailing for money. Thinking that she’ll do anything to keep John from believing that she could have ever been in on a scheme like marrying him for his money, Jessie vows to leave John before she can be accused by Eddie in front of him. As Jessie puts it at one point in the film, “Women have been hanged for less.” And she doesn’t want to be, least of all charged with being some sort of gold digger when all she’s ever prided herself on is her principles and her work ethic.
As circumstances of the Great Depression conspire to change certain fortunes, Jessie is then left to prove that the love between her and John was real all along, no question about it. And yes, Mannequin was created at a time when it was still extremely important to give people the hope to believe in the idea that it was possible to “live on love.” That if you find the right person, the two of you can surmount even the bleakest of circumstances (which, yes, Betty Broderick helped her own husband surmount before she eventually murdered him). Well, it’s nice to believe in, but it didn’t even work out for Sonny and Cher despite writing the scripture on such a matter in the form of “I Got You Babe.” So long as capitalism thrives, true love probably never can when one is on the losing side of the enterprise. Still, we have John and Jessie to look to as a symbol of how false these platitudes about survival (fortified by love) can be.
