The Rampant Age (1930)
Director Phil Rosen deserves applause for helming so many tight and punchy Poverty Row pre-Code packages that turn in at just over an hour, making them perfect for the rushed weekday night: The Rampant Age and Extravagance are just two. Both are from 1930, at the very top of the Depression, and help set the tone for the era’s rising gold-digger picture: the first’s Doris (Merna Kennedy) decides to break out of her hausfrau shell to ensnare her decidedly modern rich loverboy; the second’s Alice (June Collyer) trades in a financially substandard husband for one who can lavish her with the gifts she deserves.
The Rampant Age lives up to its title, having been adapted from a teenage Robert Spencer Carr’s novel of the debauched Twenties and put into production before the Crash. Its screenplay naturally has more hues of the Jazz Age than its little sister Extravagance, with high society’s hedonistic hooch-soaked romps making up the film’s best moments, one of which is its very first scene. The camera opens on a fully darkened room: only kissing noises, giggles, shocked gasps and flirty conversation clue us in on the naughtiness going on with the lights off (and leave the rest to the imagination), a cleverly raunchy utilization of new sound. Extravagance, which I wrote about here, is a bit more subdued in its class-hopping messaging and condemns the inherent cheapness of money altogether; The Rampant Age, on the other hand, not only glorifies deep pockets, it revels in the pleasure they bring.
Sweet, introverted Doris Lawrence, whose preference for quiet domesticity with her grandmother marks her old-fashioned and out-of-style in a fast world kept up to speed by mirthful Jazz Babies, is portrayed not as the angelic Victorian ideal of recent memory, but as a pitiable caged bird missing out on life—our first view of her is through the bars of the hackneyed symbol put prominently on display in the apartment she shares with Grandma. Wholesome Merna Kennedy is at home as a blossoming wallflower with her round face and sweet lace-collar dresses, but retains just the right ratio of coquettishness to pull off a believable turn. The writers keep us on our toes by coloring the grandmother, Mrs. Lawrence (Florence Turner), in modern shades, turning her into a delightfully cheeky, newfangled thinker who pushes Doris to take advantage of the fun her own generation couldn’t have. Old fogies are old fogies in The Rampant Age, and it’s made abundantly clear that idly sitting by and minding the needlework is no longer of any value to the suitors (or grandmas) of 1930.
Doris has a frequent rich playboy visitor, Sandy Benton—portrayed by James Murray, the soon-to-be-ill-fated star of The Crowd—who starts losing interest in her refusal to put out and let loose and takes up with the livelier Estelle (Margaret Quimby), an out-and-out gold-digger whose thawed-out gaiety is a bit more up to his speed. The other girl tackles his attentions during a raucous, sexually charged indoor game of football held at one of his ‘wild parties’, which the withdrawn Doris shies away from. “Well anyway, I made a touchdown,” Estelle croons as she lifts her bleeding knee for Sandy to tend to.
Nonetheless, Sandy maintains Estelle is only a fun toy to pass the time with before he decides to settle down with someone made of marriage material—Doris, who’s beginning to get a hint about her status on the back burner. Her enterprising grandmother finds hint of Sandy’s affair in the society column, and chastises her charge for ‘sitting around the house’ while another girl walks through the open door and makes designs on her lover; Grandmother even sends her off to battle with a bottle of 1905-vintage dandelion wine as a party favor.
Another notably suggestive, and moderately mortifying, scene comes on the heels of Doris’ decision to get out and get her man—a ‘slave auction’ at Sandy’s next party, where the female attendees are sold off to the highest bidder. The racial overtone is beyond despicable (the only Black people present are made to witness the happenings from a string band on the auction block), but the bubbling sexual undercurrent, and straightforward comment on liberated fetishism, is undeniable. Sandy’s drunken friend Eddie (Eddie Borden) bids on every beauty on the block and ends up surrounded by a happy harem; Doris, wanting to establish herself as more than a humdrum homebody and make Sandy jealous, ends up the hottest commodity and sells at the highest amount to another man.
Mission accomplished—Sandy lights Doris up for ‘making a spectacle of herself’, throwing around hypocritical, pearl-clutching phrases like ‘brazenly public’ and ‘unrefined’, despite his own tryst with Estelle being obvious enough to make the papers. He tells Doris she’s different, ‘an ideal’, and that it isn’t right for her to be seen in another man’s arms, though her inhibitions are, paradoxically, still an excuse for him to keep his options open. Doris isn’t keen on that answer; she repudiates the age-old practice of tending a hearth for a wayward man in the hopes of him coming home to her, and keeps on with one of his rich flyer friends, De Witt (Patrick Cunning).
“I’ve been cooped up and old-fashioned and out of date for too long,” she tells Sandy, who scrambles to keep his wits about him when the tables are irrevocably turned.
Grandmother Lawrence agrees. “Good girl!”, she praises her granddaughter’s antics, who openly describes to her just how two can play the same game. Humorously, a fuming Sandy tries to throw the news of Doris’ ‘disgraceful’ new social life in her grandmother’s face, only to be met with a nonchalant shrug and the suggestion that Doris’ change in demeanor was his own fault.
The climax of romantic tension as it comes to a head is memorable. Estelle gets Doris’ goat by falsely claiming in front of a flock of their intoxicated friends at the Flying Club that she and Sandy are engaged to be married. Instead of turning tail and crying all the way back home, Doris schemes that they all get married in the spirit of fun, and pairs off her friends in eeny-meeny-miny-moe fashion before landing on herself and a thrilled De Witt. Enter Sandy. The camera lingers on his expression of dejected confusion—excellently emoted by James Murray—and his change of heart finally solidifies at the prospect of seeing his best girl leave the market.
“You’re making a tramp of yourself!” he yells at Doris over the commotion. Funnily enough, this takes a laurel away from 1931’s Goldie, which is often mistakenly lauded as the earliest talkie to use the term for a promiscuous woman. Vowing never to marry her, the humiliated playboy underscores his curse with a pre-Code classic inference: “You little tramp, go straight to—”
A heartbroken Doris makes an impetuous escape after a brawl breaks out over her affections, heading straight for the cockpit of Eddie’s plane—which she knows how to fly, but not how to land—and tears off into the sky, leaving her panicked gang putting their heads together on how to stop her from killing herself. Sandy enlists the help of a second pilot to fly him up to her, and while stunting his way from one plane to another, grabs hold of Doris’ machine to break his fall only to send them both crashing into a nearby hangar.
While the circumstance is beyond belief, some thrilling aerial photography over a burgeoning Burbank works to the film’s advantage and puts the climax over effectively. The film closes with a shot of the two reconciled, bandaged lovers reaching for each other’s hands from their side-by-side hospital beds, both made wiser by the knowledge that playing dangerous games only ends in someone getting hurt.
“Have we got any more of that dandelion wine?” a third-wheeling Eddie asks from the corner, breaking the fourth wall with an extended jaded stare that ends the film on a self-aware corny note, imploring the viewer not to take what they’ve just seen all too seriously.
While The Rampant Age holds little artistic merit as a Trem Carr-produced potboiler made just before he went off to form Monogram, it knows its status and limitations. It doesn’t waste time preaching about the sins of youth like a post-Code exploitation picture, nor does it try too hard to appeal to bored husbands in the third row with an abundance of exposed breasts. It presents an authentic narrative of the era’s changing attitudes, thanks to the lived experience of the source material’s school-aged author, with a detached documentarian smoothness that seems to say with a smirk, “Well, this is how it is now, so if you don’t like it, too bad, toots!”
The film actually received first-run bookings and middling-to-positive reviews upon its release in January 1930, just as America’s Fascinating Youth were lowering their skirts after the party and letting dust collect on their rolled stockings. It met with surprisingly little resistance from the censors and Decency Groups of the world, though it was shunned from Ireland and reserved for patrons over the age of sixteen in Sacramento. Photoplay correctly typed it as a ‘hackneyed story rendered amusing by lively dialogue and acting’, and the manager of Atlanta’s Rialto Theater promoted the picture as being of ‘more than usual importance’. Housewives in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, drooled over the film’s rented Art Deco interiors, and publicity releases loudly proclaimed it as a 100% TALKING SEX FEATURE without as much as an incensed campaign from Catholic mothers—which it owes to its sheer cheapness and muted marketability of its leads.
The eventual early deaths of both—James Murray in an undetermined suicidal drowning and Merna Kennedy, one-time wife of Busby Berkeley, of a heart attack—unwittingly casts a doomed aura over The Rampant Age, reminding the viewer with a wagging finger and a ticking clock that Flaming Youth can be snuffed out for good with only a puff of breath.
While lacking the vim of Our Dancing Daughters and devoid of Norma Shearer’s satin finish in The Divorcee, The Rampant Age holds its own as an enlightening historical document on Deco indulgence without the bonus of a high production value, and is hardly a waste of an hour and forty-odd seconds; even if the squealing RCA sound discs threaten to age its continuing novelty.
Sources:
“To Release Through Tiffany and W. Ray Johnson.” Hollywood Filmograph, 14 Jun 1930, p. 26.
“No “Rampant Age” in Ireland.” The Film Daily, 8 Jun 1930, p. 8.
“The Rampant Age With Merna Kennedy Playing at Sutter.” The Sacramento Bee, 8 Mar 1930, p. 25.
“Brief Reviews of Current Pictures—The Rampant Age.” Photoplay, Apr 1930, p. 140.
“Feature Attraction at Rialto This Week Is ‘The Rampant Age’.” The Atlanta Journal, 1 Jun 1930, p. 33.
“At the Family.” The Wilkes-Barre Record, 13 Nov 1930, p. 24.
“The Rampant Age, Trem Carr Productions 1930.” SCVhistory.com, 2017, scvhistory.com/scvhistory/lw2917.htm. Accessed 24 Mar. 2025.
“The Rampant Age.” AFI.com, catalog.afi.com/Film/11544-THE-RAMPANTAGE. Accessed 23 Mar 2025.