I live My Life (1935)

Joan Crawford sports a to die for sailor pants suit and Brian Aherne manages to make boots and shorts work for him. (Just think of William Powell in a similar get-up in I Love You Again, played for laughs.)


In I Live My Life, Joan Crawford plays a spoiled heiress who gets entangled with an archeologist on a cruise to Greece. To her surprise he follows her to New York where he proceeds to interfere with her plan to marry a society stooge. (Fred Keating)

The spoiled-heiress-gets-schooled-by-love plot requires a delicate touch for it not to become a series of increasingly violent hissy fits. Joan Crawford is a force of nature, taking over the movie, and not always to betterment of the picture as a whole. In the scenes where she's supposed to be cracking wise, she bursts into laughter that seems like it might be as likely leveled at the script as it is at her counterpart in the scene. This is the first time I've seen her play comedy, and I wasn't really impressed. Brian Aherne tries admirably to be as rude, petty and obnoxious as his British genes will allow him, managing an insane screaming rant at one point, but even that is not enough to quite balance things when Hurricane Joan takes center stage.

Crawford and Aherne put across the idea that they are attracted to one another, and yet there's no real warmth or feeling of sympathy between them. Mick LaSalle had a good post on his blog a while back about what he called the Romantic Fallacy. The idea that just because a Person A is the wrong mate, doesn't necessarily mean that Person B is the right match. In a good romantic comedy you never question the Romantic Fallacy. In a bad one, it becomes achingly clear. I would say that I Live my Life is a mediocre romantic comedy about two fiercely independent people who have nothing in common and no willingness for compromise. If these two really did get married they'd be miserable, and the audience knows it. The plot doesn't even bother to resolve these differences and in the end Joan just gives in, I guess because she's the woman and this is a post-production code world.

Though I love these two actors, I can't help but think they are probably just miscast. If it were Clark Gable and Carole Lombard we would accept the whole conceit because that was Gable and Lombard after all in real life. In a way, Gable and Lombard loom like a shadow over I Live My Life. Nobody played the spoiled heiress better than Lombard and the following year her performance in My Man Godfrey would make all other spoiled heiresses to come afterward seem like cheap imitations. She had a way of bringing sympathy to the character that Crawford can't manage. In one scene Joan keeps trying to get up from her chair and Aherne keeps pushing her back down in her seat a la Gable in A Free Soul. Apparently some of Aherne's antics were so over the top, they had to be toned down for British audiences to the point that an alternate ending was made for the film for the foreign market. Yet, later that year British Audiences would make rude, unchivalrous Robert Donat in The Thirty-Nine Steps a box office sensation.

Thank goodness for MGM's stable of character actors: Frank Morgan, Arthur Treacher, Eric Blore and Aline McMahon who provide most of the laughs. Crawford's scenes with Morgan are particularly delightful. A good supporting cast is not only essential for a good romantic comedy, but in this case, they manage to keep things reasonably afloat while the leads flounder a bit. I Live My Life is definitely worth watching as an early, though not totally successful, example of screwball comedy.

A Pair of Ladies

Warren William and May Robson in Lady for a Day. Thanks to Cliff at Warren William dot com for the still.

Lady for a Day (1933) is an early example of classic Frank Capra fish out of water comedy. May Robson plays a boozing old apple peddler who poses as a society dame in order to fool her daughter's fiancee and his family. Warren William plays the gambler Dave the Dude with an irrationally strong attachment to Annie's apples as good luck charms. Dave gets completely consumed by the plot, borrowing an apartment, convincing his girlfriend to give the old girl a makeover, pressing his gang into posing as dignitaries and eventually getting himself deep into a kidnapping charge. So deep, that only a last act, Frank Capra style miracle could pull him out. For a pre-code film, this was pretty tame and even Missouri Martin's (Glenda Farrell) "I need a Man" dance number probably would have made it through the censors later in the decade. Why this film got lost, I'll never understand because it would have perfect for revival. I guess the studios had enough current Frank Capra product to deal with in later years.

William and Robson are quite fun together, but he always hangs back and the movie skillfully avoids getting mushy. You know Dave's motivation is more than just needing her luck, that there is also real affection there as well, but he never lets it out of the bag for more than a moment. That's one of the things I appreciate about William as an actor. Dave is an unrepentant scoundrel who may or may not get roped into making an honest woman out of Missouri Martin, but he is still likeable. Annie for her part gives up the sauce and becomes infinitely less fun. Robson is great when she's embarrassing herself with her nails on chalkboard shriek in a posh hotel lobby or when she's penning letters to her daughter while slugging back an entire bottle of gin. She's just perfunctory and proper when she becomes a society lady and she has too few moments where you think she might slip a little. The characters are probably too numerous and those that should have center stage, get the short shrift in the second half of the movie as Capra's jauggernaut plot steams along to its conclusion despite them. I would also like the relationship between Missouri and Dave to be fleshed out a little more, or at all.

Building on the success of its first Lady, Columbia knocked off Lady by Choice, less than a year later with the same star (May Robson) and several of same supporting players including the always-excellent Walter Connolly. This time Robson plays a boozing bag lady who gets adopted by a fan dancer (Carole Lombard) as a Mother's Day publicity stunt. Despite being derivative, this rehash is actually just as entertaining as the first "Lady." Where Capra delights in heaping more characters and complications into his plot, director David Burton hangs back and concentrates on the relationship between Lombard and Robson. Robson actually gets to explore this character and really bring her to life in this second film. Robson and Lombard are very good and they work wonderfully well together, skillfully cranking out comedy and playing just enough sentiment, but not too much. There is a weak love story (we really could have used a Warren William here!) with Roger Pryor and Lombard. Of course, Lombard is luminous and charming as always and manages to carry those parts of the picture despite not being particularly well matched.

Lady for a Day is a busy picture that will probably reward repeat viewing and Lady by Choice may be a pleasant surprise, a knock-off that is every bit as good as the original.

Mr and Mrs Smith: Hitchcock goes Screwball

Mr and Mrs Smith (1941) is best remembered as Alfred Hitchcok's only foray into screwball comedy. Sandwiched between Foreign Correspondent and Suspicion in Hitchcock's oeuvre the movie is mostly glossed over by those who are trying to piece together a careful analysis of his devlopment as an auteur. That is somewhat beside the point of this piece of dream factory fluff. It's a quickly-made comedic star vehicle for glamorous Carole Lombard that covers the familiar ground of her earlier hit My Man Godfrey (1936). There is nothing-like authorship in the direction which lacks the Master's usual camera gimmicks and obsessive themes. Hitchock does his cameo, but his own lack of enthusiasm for the material shows a bit. He doesn't go out of his way to imprint his style on it.

This may be Hitch phoning it in, but it still stands up with the era's best in this genre. Screwball had peaked well before 1941 and Mr. and Mrs. Smith is one of the best late offerings. Though not as brilliant as the Grant and Dunne's follow up to The Awful Truth, My Favorite Wife, which came out the year before, this follow up to My Man Godfrey is consistently funny throughout and is a more evenly paced film. Where My Favorite Wife runs out of gas by the third act, Mr and Mrs. Smith is still going strong as curtain falls.

As in My Man Godfrey, the principal characters let violent argument stand in for passion. Audiences today frequently comment that the characters in these films are shrill or unlikeable as they throw bits of art deco furnishings at one another. And unlike Godfrey, there is no moral object lesson behind the bluster. No one learns to be a better human being through the proceedings. In fact, just the opposite occurs. The characters unapologetically learn nothing and are reunited simply because they are both such miserable people they can't really live with anyone else. If all this sounds loathsome, it's not. It's actually quite funny and charming. In this sort of role Carol Lombard could do no wrong. She's at once attractive and repulsive in her extremes and Robert Montgomery handles his role deftly as well.

David Smith is a fairly dispicable guy on the surface of things, he drinks too much, ignores his work, and hides the fact that he and his wife are not married simply to indulge the lurid idea that his wife will be like a mistress for a night or two. "Mrs." Smith isn't much better. After throwing her husband out, she lies about her marital status, goes on a date with her new boss and begins courting her "husband's" law partner. When the later refuses to physically defend her honor, she walks out on both saying that they should get a pair of girl guides and go camping together.

Mr and Mrs. Smith is a classic "comedy of remarriage" and pays homage to that genre in slight but telling way at the beginning of the movie. The clerk sent to inform the Smiths that their nuptuals weren't on the up and up repeatedly announces that all marriages since 1936 are invalid. I wonder if it was coincidence that 1936 was the year My Man Godfrey was made and the year in which the word "screwball" came into the lexicon?