Double Harness (John Cromwell, 1933)

Ann Harding and William Powell in Double Harness

Cast: Ann Harding, William Powell, Lucile Browne, Henry Stephenson, Lilian Bond, George Meeker, Reginald Owen, Kay Hammond, Leigh Allen, Hugh Huntley, Wallis Clark, Fred Santley. Screenplay: Jane Murfin, based on a play by Edward Poor Montgomery. Cinematography: J. Roy Hunt. Art direction: Charles M. Kirk, Van Nest Polglase. Film editing: George Nichols Jr.

Double Harness is a rather brittle comedy of manners that might be better known if it hadn't vanished for years, owing to a dispute between producer Merian C. Cooper and RKO. Because it was withheld from release until Turner Classic Movies obtained the rights to it in 2007, we had one less opportunity to see Ann Harding, once expected to become a major Hollywood star on the strength of her looks and her stage-trained voice, the latter a great asset in the early years of talking pictures. Harding gives a good performance in Double Harness, but she lacked the vivid personality of actresses of the period who became bigger stars, like Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Barbara Stanwyck, so her career never quite took off. She plays Joan Colby, member of a well-to-do family that finds itself on the skids in the depression, so that she and her giddy sister, Valerie (Lucile Browne), need to marry well in order to regain status. Valerie does marry, but her spendthrift ways keep her on the hunt for money to pay the debts she hides from her husband. Joan is taken with John Fletcher (William Powell), heir to a successful shipping company but more interested in playing polo than in running the business -- or in getting married. Joan overcomes the latter obstacle by a trick: She arranges for her father (Henry Stephenson) to discover her in Fletcher's apartment, which she has more or less moved into, one night. Fletcher does the right thing and marries her, unaware that he's been tricked, but he and Joan also come to an agreement that they will divorce after a suitable period of time elapses. Naturally, they begin to fall more deeply in love, as Fletcher begins to realize that Joan has not only made life more pleasant for him, she has also begun to take a hand in his shipping business. But then Valerie spills the beans about how Joan had tricked Fletcher into marrying her, and an old flame of his, Monica Page (Lilian Bond), takes advantage of his anger and tries to snare him for herself. And so on to the anticipated outcome. Double Harness is a little too arch and stagey for its own good, and the idea that a man might have to marry a young woman because she's found in his apartment at night was a little old-fashioned even at the time, but Harding and Powell do what they can with the material.

Morning Glory (Lowell Sherman, 1933)

Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Katharine Hepburn in Morning Glory

Cast: Katharine Hepburn, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Adolphe Menjou, Mary Duncan, C. Aubrey Smith, Don Alvarado, Fred Santley, Richard Carle, Tyler Brooke, Geneva Mitchell, Helen Ware. Screenplay: Howard J. Green, based on a play by Zoe Akins. Cinematography: Bert Glennon. Art direction: Charles M. Kirk, Van Nest Polglase. Film editing: William Hamilton. Music: Max Steiner.

Morning Glory earned Katharine Hepburn her first Oscar. It was only the sixth Academy Award for best actress ever given, and in some ways it was the first "modern" Oscar for acting. The initial one went to Janet Gaynor for a silent-film performance, and the subsequent ones were for Hollywood grande dames making their way out of silence, Mary Pickford and Norma Shearer; for beloved old trouper Marie Dressler; and for a Broadway diva making a temporary detour into movies, Helen Hayes. That last one shows what Hollywood was looking for, and what it found in Hepburn: actors who could talk. But unlike the diminutive and rather plain Hayes, Hepburn could hold the camera. Hollywood had never seen anything quite like her: beautiful in an imperious way, she had real presence and a unique style. That style would harden into mannerism after a few years and get her branded as "box-office poison" until she managed to turn things around again in the 1940s, with The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940) and the subsequent potent teaming with Spencer Tracy. But for the time she was praised for a tonic, refreshing hold on the screen. Morning Glory itself is not much: the familiar story of the hopeful who goes out there and comes back a star. Lowell Sherman, who directed, had just appeared in a similar fable, the ur-Star Is Born movie What Price Hollywood? (Cukor, 1932), and the pattern hardened when Ruby Keeler subbed in for Bebe Daniels in 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon, 1933). Hepburn manages to segue convincingly from the naive chatterbox trying to muscle her way onto Broadway to the mature, toughened but still insecure character at the end, though it's a little unclear why such veterans as Adolphe Menjou's producer and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.'s playwright would be so susceptible to the pest that Eva Lovelace makes of herself at first. Also unclear is why Eva's performances of Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy and Juliet's part of the balcony scene so impress the guests at the party: Hepburn rattles them off with no attention to the meaning behind the familiar words. She seems, for example, to take the line "Wherefore art thou Romeo?" as a question about his location rather than about his name. The film is pre-Code, so one thing is clear:  that Eva and the producer have slept together after she gets soused at the party. 

Christopher Strong (Dorothy Arzner, 1933)

Christopher Strong (Dorothy Arzner, 1933)

Cast: Katharine Hepburn, Colin Clive, Billie Burke, Helen Chandler, Ralph Forbes, Irene Browne, Jack La Rue, Desmond Roberts. Screenplay: Zoe Akins, based on a novel by Gilbert Frankau. Cinematography: Bert Glennon. Art direction: Van Nest Polglase, Charles M. Kirk. Film editing: Arthur Roberts. Music: Max Steiner.