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.

Of lingerie models and leering boyfriends

Anita Page (right) and Bessie Love pre-pare for a bath in The Broadway Melody (1929).

I watched a trio of Anita Page movies from the early pre-code era recently: The Broadway Melody, Skyscraper Souls and Our Blushing Brides. Anita Page wasn't a great actress but she was a memorable presence on screen. She made her biggest impact in the silent era with Our Dancing Daughters (pre-curser to Our Blushing Brides) and the transition into sound was seemingly easy for her. She is natural and easy-going in her talkies, though sometimes she seems to loose the screen to more forceful actors, like co-star Joan Crawford. In all three of these movies Page plays a woman that men like to look at, whether on a broadway stage, modeling lingerie or standing behind a perfume counter, she is always the eye candy that pays the bills for some man. And there is always a stage-door johnny type ready to load her up with jewelry and furs and empty promises. While her more famous co-star, Joan Crawford, always played the good girl in these situations, Page got to be the girl who lets her foot slip once in a while.

The Broadway Melody (1929) was a very popular movie in its day but it is maddeningly slow and the musical numbers feel distant and uninspiring. I'm willing to forgive this clunkiness as a side effect of its being one of the first full-length talkies. The central relationship in the movie between Queenie (Anita Page) and her sister, Hank (Bessie Love) is just a bit weird. Queenie is in love with Eddie (Charles King) but he is engaged to Hank. For Hank's part she seems more obsessed with her sister than her boyfriend. Queenie has to choose between a producer named Jock Warriner (a thinly disguised Jack Warner) that wants to keep her in high style and low morals and her sister's beau. What's a good girl to do? Apparently the answer is to walk around in her underclothes a lot. Queenie goes so far as to take a bath in her underwear, which has to be one of the most bizarre thing I've seen in a pre-code film.

In Our Blushing Brides (1930) Anita Page plays Connie a department store clerk who is having an affair with the owner's son (Raymond Hackett). Her roommate, Joan Crawford works in the same store but prefers to keep the owner's other son (Robert Montgomery) at arm's length. Things don't turn out well for Anita's character as her boyfriend keeps her on the side while continuing to juggle society dames. Joan Crawford has one flirtatious encounter after another with Montgomery until you wish they would fall in love already. Their romance mostly takes place in his unreal, only-in-the-movies tree house complete with electric lights, telephone and mechanically descending staircase. One of his favorite tricks is to bring women up there and pull up the stairs so they can't leave. Charming. Crawford and Page also model for the department store (naturally) so that is what gives the excuse for them to be changing clothes perpetually. I don't think they invented those changing screens (you know the kind where the woman ducks behind and shortly afterward you see her dress slung over the top of the screen, followed by her stockings) until 1934.

In Skyscraper Souls, Anita Page mixes it up a bit: she plays a lingerie model and a prostitute who turns tricks for extra pocket money and to bail out her friends from financial disaster. (Click here for full review of Skyscraper Souls.) This clever bit of scripting gives Anita double the chances to undress before the camera. In the end she winds up going straight and marrying the only man in the Dwight Building that hasn't been paying her to see her in the altogether.

I really enjoyed all three of these movies, each in their own way and Anita Page is certainly entertaining and of, course, watchable in all of them.

What a darling ensemble!

I'm pretty confused about female friendships after watching Jane Austen Book Club and The Women (1939) in the same day. Are my female friends horrified by my personal calamities or secretly thrilled by them? Are they the wind beneath my wings or the knife in my back? The classic 1939 film maintains that most women are a pack of gossiping, shrewish harpies whose main pleasure is to shop and send the bills to their husbands who are so busy having affairs with perfume counter girls that they don't notice another $250 nightgown (in 1939 money!) more or less. The 2007 film maintains that women become instantly bonded over the smallest triviality (a favorite author) and spend the rest of their lives bucking each other up with a steady diet of reading Jane Austen, wine-drinking and Ugg-wearing. That I have female friends that remind me of characters from both movies only adds to the confusion.

Here's the thing about these staggeringly different "chick flicks:" I really loved both of them because of all of the amazing ensemble acting. I'm a total sucker for ensemble acting. The Big Chill is one of my favorite movies of all time though I have little interest in the 1960s or the lives of self-obsessed yuppies who went to college in the sixties. Give me a movie where a bunch of actors get enough room to really create characters and even if their interactions are hopelessly contrived (as in both The Women and The Jane Austen Book Club) and I'm all over it.

Here are a few of the highlights:

Rosalind Russell in the Women is a revelation even for this Ros Russell fan. She's over the top loathsome and catty and though she was a gorgeous glamorous woman she was completely willing to lookunattractive in this film. The ingenious costuming always includes extra tall ugly hats and fussy ruffles is designed to make Russell looks as awkward as possible. Compare her to star Norma Shearer who was actually a little bit frumpy in this movie until the final scenes and to Joan Crawford who benefits from the femme fatale wardrobe she's given. Speaking of wardrobe, The Women has about 15 minutes of amazing filler in the form of a technicolor fashion show. These are some of the most hilriously odd clothes I've ever seen in my life. The recent remake of the film has the main character, Mary Haines, as a fashion designer. I like how the original film skewers the world of fashion, the absurdity, the expense and the snobbishness. And then of course it turns around and gives you fifteen minutes of clothing eye candy.

Emily Blunt in Jane Austen book Club is excellent as the tightly wound "time bomb" Prudie who has serious mommy issues and a thing for one of her high school students. She also has the most amazing clothes, which stand in stark contrast to the other "hippy handcraft" wearing members of the club.

Paulette Goddard stands out in a critical but small part in The Women. I love her advice to Mary Haines, "You forgot to lick her in the one place it counts. In his arms. And if I know men that's still Custer's last stand." And then she goes on to have the film's one genuine cat fight, with Rosalind Russell. Awesome.

Hugh Dancy plays the lone male member of the book club. He's a sci fi nerd who is attracted to one of the members and so ends up reading all of Jane Austen as well as the Mysteries of Udolpho just to get her attention. Stunt reading. Look ma, no cliff's notes. I love his take on "Mansfield Park," that it's a reverse Empire Strikes Back, because the brother and sister get together at the end.

It would take a much longer blog post than I really feeling like doing right now to go into depth about either of these movies. They are both vacuous, enjoyable and have a way of distracting and soothing the way a good chic flic should.