The film allows her a conventional happy ending.

Jennie (Anita Page) becomes the mistress of a buyer, and then disappears with him, the wages of sin in this case being exile to Evanston IL. In the book, administrative assistant Sarah (Verree Teasdale) is lamenting a transgression of her youth, not having a current affair with Dwight. Almost all the intertwined subplots were devised for Skyscraper Souls, with just wisps of them in the book, giving the impression that the movies were far more sophisticated than even the acme of popular fiction. Skyscraper is a standard love triangle, with successful David Dwight seemingly modeled on Adolphe Menjou, unlike the tall, suave Warren William, who plays him in the film. Movies are often guilty of simplifying complex books, but in this case, the opposite is true.

She was a popular novelist of the day who often dealt with stories of women navigating their professional and personal lives in books and magazine serials like The Office Wife and Wife vs. The film was based on Faith Baldwin’s 1931 novel Skyscraper. My building is bigger than your building. Women work, but it’s sex that seems to be their true vocation, whether they are dedicated executive secretaries, lowly stenographers, dress fitting models or restless wives. Below his penthouse-dwelling feet the lives of the humble and the great unfurl.

David Dwight is the master of a phallic symbol even bigger than the Empire State Building (just completed in 1931) as seasonal views of an atmospheric matte painting remind us. Warren William, Maureen O’Sullivan, Gregory Ratoff, Anita Page, Verree Teasdale, Norman Foster, Jean Hersholt, Wallace Ford (99 min.)Īs Wall Street to the eighties, or The Big Short, Margin Call or any tale of financial chicanery, Skyscraper Souls fuses male ego, money and power. Skyscraper Souls (1932) Directed by Edgar Selwyn.

Skyscraper by Faith Baldwin