rick_7
Posts: 3174
Joined: 30/9/2005
From: The Land of Nod
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What was that? "Whoo! Yeah! Myrna!"? Onwards, then...
The Perfect Wife (1934-1937) - Part Two
Loy and Powell in Libeled Lady
*VARIOUS SPOILERS, particularly for Wings in the Dark and To Mary - with Love*
If you're a Cary Grant fan, you'll maybe have caught a pair of fun comedies he did with Myrna in the late '40's. Less well known is their first film together, 1935's Wings in the Dark (3), one of a rash of aviation dramas made during cinema's short-lived but startlingly intense love affair with planes. Anyone who's always wanted to see Myrna in full pilot get-up can't do without this hackneyed but very watchable redemption pic. Grant's a headstrong engineer, blinded in a workshop accident, Myrna's a stunt-flier acting as his guardian angel. When her long-distance flight goes awry, only he can save her, using the "flying blind" apparatus he's been tinkering with. Myrna's only recollections of the film in her autobiography were that Grant was constantly moping around. It doesn't show - trite material gets good treatment, with classy stars and top support, including Dean Jagger, Hobart Cavanaugh and Tweedledee himself, Roscoe Karns. Not half bad. Whipsaw (3.5) is one of Myrna's best - a cracking romantic thriller inexplicably forgotten. Spencer Tracy as an FBI agent! Myrna as a jewel thief! Thunderstorms! Shoot-outs! Midwifery! All this and John Qualen too. Terrific.
That was it for '35 as Myrna went on strike for equal pay. A quarter of a million dollars tempted her back for 1936's Wife vs Secretary (2.5), a flat screenplay rescued by a good cast - Myrna, Gable, Jean Harlow, a young Jimmy Stewart. Gable leaves Myrna an expensive watch in her food (classy!), then spends too much time with pouty Harlow. Misunderstandings pile-up and Gable's mum (May Robson, the Queen of Hearts!) sends Myrna frantic with suggestions of infidelity. Too stressful to be very enjoyable - one of those strained, po-faced pseudo-farcical situations you wish could get sorted out with a wrinkle of the nose - as it would in The Thin Man. Stewart's first role opposite Myrna, he went around set telling everybody he would marry only her. Still, he didn't break into her house and break her table, like Spencer Tracy.
Petticoat Fever (2.5) takes place in a similar sort of place to John Carpenter's The Thing - a snowbound, sparsely-populated outpost. There's no amorphous alien virus though, just Reginald Owen as Myrna's pompous prig of a fiance. No surprises in this peculiar, patchy romantic comedy, but Myrna and Robert Montgomery make a likeable couple and there are a few nice jokes. The Great Ziegfeld (3.5) brought Myrna and Bill back together for their fourth film - and their first in two years. It's probably Powell's best dramatic performance, breathing life into the eponymous showman. Vast, stunning production numbers complement his powerful showing. Frank Morgan matches him turn for turn as his contemporary and early rival, Jack Billings. Luise Rainer won one of the least deserved Oscars in memory for her mannered, self-pitying supporting role. Her celebrated telephone call is several minutes of desperate over-emoting, draining most of the meaning from a strong script. Myrna only turns up in the final quarter - as Powell's second wife Billie Burke (who played Glenda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz, and acted opposite Myrna in 1937's Parnell). She and Powell resume where they left off in '34, with irressistible interplay. Fanny Brice plays herself - she got a biopic herself, William Wyler's 1968 musical Funny Girl, which seems a generous title given her showing here. On a side note, Barbra Streisand is excellent in that film.
Having tempted her back to work, MGM made Myrna earn her new wage-packet: she shot a further three features before 1936 was out. To Mary - with Love (2.5) re-teamed her with Warner Baxter. It feels like a script from another age, with the kind of messy, broad, melodramatic scenarios rarely inflicted on the studio's major stars once they graduated to 'A' features. And yet some of the dialogue is really good. "People are always saying the movies should be like life," Myrna breathes at one point, "I think life should be more like the movies." I bet that spoke to Depression-era audiences. The post-miscarriage scene is very moving. Myrna had an abortion the same year and one wonders whether that influenced the rawness of her performance in that scene.
Libeled Lady (4) is a superlative screwball comedy - one of the best films ever made and one of my most-watched too. When Warren Haggerty's (Spencer Tracy) newspaper libels flighty heiress Connie Allenbury (Myrna), she sues them for $5 million. But Haggerty won't take it lying down and - after some scintillating exchanges ("From Brooklyn to Bombay, a stab in the back spells Haggerty - ah, I was right..."), hires scurrillous ex-newspaper man Bill Chandler (William Powell) to compromise her on a transatlantic ferry. But Chandler has to be married first, so Haggerty weds him to his own fiancee, Gladys Benton (Jean Harlow). Then Bill falls in love with Connie and things get really messy. Phenomenal comedy is fast, hysterically funny and endlessly quotable. Loy, Powell and Harlow were never better, and it's Tracy's best comic turn too. Highly recommended.
After the Thin Man (4) is just as good, and one of the few sequels that matches the first instalment - 1934's The Thin Man, of course. Continuing where that film left off, Nick and Nora are plunged into a fresh mystery, this time closer to home, with Myrna's cousin Selma (Elissa Landi), accused of bumping off her no-good husband (Alan Marshal). Brilliant mystery-comedy is one highlight after another, including Powell playing up at a respectable dinner-party, Myrna getting locked in a police cell ("Is that the woman doing the fan-dance?," asks a cop, "If it is she's been holding out on me.") and great ending. Loy and Powell are wonderful, complementing each other perfectly. Fine cast of stars and stars-to-be too - including Maltese character actor Joseph Calleia, Jimmy Stewart, Jessie Ralph and Penny Singleton (the Blondie of many a serial and later the voice of Jane Jetson!). Sam Levene plays the Nat Pendleton part this time.
1937's Parnell (2.5) is one of the most unjustly dismissed films in Myrna's back catalogue. Its problem might be that it's stuck between genres, mixing romance with 1880s Irish politics. The pace is slowish and the film's talkiness is accentuated by the leaden direction. Gable does a fine job in the lead though - he actually bothered acting in this one - and Myrna is equally fine as Parnell's married lover, and the source of his ultimate downfall. Well worth seeing once, I'd like to know what you think of it. Double Wedding (3.5) is a very underrated, "bohemian" comedy, adapted from a French stage-play but seamlessly relocated to New York. Myrna plays a strict, matronly, chain-smoking (but likeable) businesswoman, who disapproves of her younger sister's boyfriend - perpetually broke playwright Powell. The film has a reputation for slapstick, but there's only a handful of pratfalls and the routines are rarely prolonged. The script is funny, with John Beal enjoying a peach of a role in support. He's hysterical as Waldo Beaver - "not weak, just agreeable". The results belie a troubled, unhappy production. Powell's fiancee Jean Harlow died during filming.
< Message edited by rick_7 -- 13/9/2007 3:56:30 PM >
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