A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, November 30, 2023

No Man of Her Own (Wesley Ruggles, 1932)

Clark Gable and Carole Lombard in No Man of Her Own
Cast: Clark Gable, Carole Lombard, Dorothy Mackaill, Grant Mitchell, Elizabeth Patterson, George Barbier, J. Farrell MacDonald, Tommy Conlon, Walter Walker, Paul Ellis, Charley Grapewin. Screenplay: Maurine Dallas Watkins, Milton Herbert Gropper, Edmund Goulding, Benjamin Glazer, based on a novel by Val Lewton. Cinematography: Lee Tover. Film editing: Otho Lovering. Costume design: Travis Banton. 

If actors weren't cattle, as Alfred Hitchcock is reported to have said, they were at least property, and their studios treated them as such. Clark Gable was becoming one of MGM's most valuable properties when he was loaned out to Paramount to make the only film in which he starred with Carole Lombard, who later became his wife. It was part of a complicated talent swamp initiated by Marion Davies, who had clout with MGM because of her relationship with William Randolph Hearst, who produced films for her that were distributed by MGM. Davies wanted Bing Crosby for a movie, so Paramount traded him to MGM for Gable and No Man of Her Own. Lombard became his co-star only because Miriam Hopkins didn't want to take second billing to Gable. The studio mountains labored to bring forth a cinematic mouse: a passable romantic comedy remembered only for the star teaming. Gable and Lombard are very good in it, though he comes off somewhat better than she does. Lombard was best in movies that gave her license to clown, like Twentieth Century (Howard Hawks, 1934) and My Man Godfrey (Gregory La Cava, 1936). In No Man of Her Own she's simply a woman who knows what she wants, and it isn't necessarily Gable, it's just to get out of the dull little town where she's the librarian. Gable on the other hand is in a role tailor-made for him: "Babe" Stewart, a raffish professional poker player who's as adept at wooing women as he is at cheating at cards. On the verge of getting caught by the detective (J. Farrell MacDonald) who's been tailing him, he skips town and winds up in the burg that Lombard's Connie Randall wants to escape. She catches his eye -- in one pre-Code scene she climbs a ladder and he looks up her skirt -- and with improbable speed they get married. Eventually she finds out that he's not the stockbroker he pretends to be, but nothing fazes her. He gets in trouble again, but just as he's about to take it on the lam, deserting her, he finds of course that he really loves her. The story lacks snap and tension: It was cobbled together from several sources, nominally from a novel by Val Lewton called No Bed of Her Own, a title the Hays Office nixed, but also from another story in Paramount's files. What life the film has comes from Wesley Ruggles's direction and from its performers, including Dorothy Mackaill as Babe's former partner in card-sharping. Lombard and Gable work well together, but reportedly didn't strike any off-screen sparks at the time -- they were both married to other people. They met again at a party four years later and were married in 1939.   

 

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