Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with today’s installment of A Movie A Day.
[For those now joining us, A Movie A Day is my attempt at filling in gaps in my film knowledge. My DVD collection is thousands strong, many of them films I haven’t seen yet, but picked up as I scoured used DVD stores. Each day I’ll pull a previously unseen film from my collection or from my DVR and discuss it here. Each movie will have some sort of connection to the one before it, be it cast or crew member.]
I went into this movie expecting a very different film. I don’t know why, but in my mind I had this pictured as a darker film, maybe a noir-ish melodrama or at the very least a heavy drama/thriller, but what I got instead was a wickedly funny, risky bit of business. It’s almost slapstick in some scenes, but the genius of the movie lies with the rapid-fire dialogue, sharp retorts, sexual innuendo and biting sarcasm.
We follow Spencer Tracy from yesterday’s IT’S A MAD MAD MAD MAD WORLD and LIBELED LADY seems to be the perfect follow-up, comedy to comedy with Tracy at radically different points in his life.
Here he plays a newspaperman who seems to be looking for any excuse not to marry his fiancée played by Jean Harlow, a petulant smart-ass, but with good reason. Tracy really is a dick towards her and she’s had enough, refusing to be stood up one more time, put on the backburner for the newspaper yet again.
But on the eve of his wedding, he is once again called away for an emergency. This time a batch of copies of the morning paper running a front page story that turns out to be false slips through and gives him the excuse he needs to ditch Harlow at the altar yet again.
It’s a pretty bad fuck-up, running a story that was unconfirmed from halfway across the globe about heiress Connie Allenbury (Myrna Loy) acting out at a party. Turns out to be complete BS and they stop all but 50 copies from getting out, but those 50 are enough to get back to Loy and her powerful father (Walter Connolly).
Guilty of libel now, Tracy’s ass is on the line and it’s to him to make it right, stop Loy from filing suit, which is a major suit, a ridiculous sum of money that would bankrupt the paper, which Tracy and his boss suspect is the ulterior motive behind the suit. They don’t really underline it, but the implication is Connolly is a competator and definitely no fan of their rag.
Out of desperation, Tracy swallows his pride and reaches out to a womanizing sleazebag named Bill Chandler (William Powell). The two don’t have a good history, Tracy having fired Powell sometime before, but with the paper on the line, he has to do whatever he can to derail Loy’s suit by tarnishing her character. Enter Powell, to thrust himself into her life and orchestrate some scandals that will discredit the poor lady.
That reads like pretty typical romantic comedy fodder, doesn’t it? I guess what sets this apart the chemistry between Powell and Loy, co-stars already of the super-popular THIN MAN series and the witty writing of all the main leads.
It’s an odd movie. You’d expect Spencer Tracy to be the lead and for the first 15 minutes of the movie he is, then it’s solidly William Powell’s movie, only to be this bizarre amalgam of twisted point of view for the final act.
And they also really go above and beyond to tarnish this lady’s character… Tracy somehow even manages to convince his fiancée to marry Powell so there can be a bitter, well publicized divorce with Loy in the middle as the home-wrecker. This is a legal marriage. And they talk Jean Harlow into it. Unbelievable!
So while you have the A story-line being Powell ingratiating himself to the Allenbury family the B story-line is the time in-between Powell’s visits with Loy, where he has to keep up the appearance of a married couple with Harlow. The A and B storylines actually mirror each other. Both Loy and Harlow are cold to Powell at first, but soon his charms chip away at their exteriors until they’re both in love with him.
Imagine the complications this brings, especially when he genuinely falls for Loy and has to spend the second half of the movie trying to keep this shakey house of cards from falling down on his head.
The humor in this movie is definitely risky. Setting aside the blatant disregard for the sanctity of marriage, the script (by Maurine Dallas Watkins, Howard Emmett Rogers and George Oppenheimer) is filled to the brim with innuendo. Fishing plays a central part in this movie and hearing Loy talking about desiring to get a “rod” back in her grip… well, c’mon. They knew what they were doing.
Just the level of biting sarcasm from Jean Harlow alone pushes the envelope of the time and makes for a movie that’s still genuinely funny today.
That’s not to give Harlow a shitload of credit as an actress. I haven’t seen much of her work, so I won’t make a broad critique, but in this movie she’s not the best actress in the world. What she lacks in any sort of subtlety or range she makes up for in sheer personality. Harlow is a character. It’s in her eyes, body language, harsh delivery… it might not be acting I can admire, but I can definitely give her a lot of credit for making her own brand and making it accessible enough for the audience to buy into her character.
Powell and Loy come off much better, but by this point they had already at least one THIN MAN movie, the second of which came out the same year as LIBELED LADY, so there was a built in comfort with one another and an ease to their back and forths. I haven’t seen any of the THIN MAN movies, much to my shame. I know they’ll be right up my alley and I have the Thin Man box set, the flicks are in the AMAD line-up and we will hit them… probably all in a row, like I did with THE PINK PANTHER movies… But after seeing Powell and Loy in this film, I’m more eager than ever to dig into the adventures of Nick and Nora.
Spencer Tracy is, as always, a consummate professional showing that he’s just as talented at comedy as he is at drama. Talk about subtle work, his comedy in this movie is almost all played low-key, under the skin almost. But once you start seeing it, you read it into everything he does and suddenly his character becomes one of the funnier people in the movie.
Final Thoughts: It’s movies like LIBELED LADY that keep my fire going for this column. It’s a flick I probably never would have picked up if I wasn’t hunting for potential AMAD titles and it turns out to be one of the finest examples of comedy I’ve seen from this era. It’s somehow slapstick without being stupid (the clutzy William Powell fishing scene in particular), it’s a romantic comedy without being too sappy and it’s a character comedy that is both complex and easy to follow. The humor is woven throughout the many threads and intertwining plots, sewing it all up nice and tidy and making it a gem of the era.
Here’s what we have lined up for the next week:
Saturday, November 8th: UP THE RIVER (1930)
Sunday, November 9th: DOCTOR BULL (1933)
Monday, November 10th: JUDGE PRIEST (1930)
Tuesday, November 11th: TEN LITTLE INDIANS (1965)
Wednesday, November 12th: MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS (1974)
Thursday, November 13th: DANIEL (1983)
Friday, November 14th: EL DORADO (1967)
One of my early AMADs was RIO BRAVO, a film that I loved… and when I reviewed it, I was unaware of a quasi-(or not so quasi-)remake from all the creative team involved, including John Wayne, Howard Hawks and screenwriter Leigh Brackett called EL DORADO. I picked it up and looky-looky what’s on the list in a week. Should be interesting to compare and contrast the two.
But tomorrow we keep the golden age of Hollywood going strong, following Spencer Tracy yet again to John Ford’s 1930 comedy UP THE RIVER co-starring one Humphrey Bogart. See you folks tomorrow for that one!
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
