[Movie Clip]
David Hast: Scott, have you seen Libeled Lady?
Scott Vander Werf: I just saw it recently on your recommendation, Jean Harlow, William Powell, Myrna Loy, and Spencer Tracy, and I found it to be very delightful, one of the great 1930s screwball comedies.
DH: It is. It's one of the best examples of the genre. It's full of fast, witty dialogue, that characteristic style and look that we so associate with a lot of Hollywood's depression era comedies. It's sort of three comedies in one. It's a newspaper movie. It's a comedy of manners and sophistication. We've seen all, you know, there's many of those screwball comedies from the 30s where they're wearing tuxedos and top hats in various scenes. And it's also a marital mix-up comedy.
SVW: Where you're not sure who loves who and you don't know where things are gonna end.
DH: Yeah, you don't even know who's married and who's not and it gets really confusing. This was a top, you know, “A” picture from MGM. MGM and it starred four people who were all huge box office. Myrna Loy and William Powell had just made The Thin Man and I think the first Thin Man sequel, so they were huge. They always had great chemistry in movies together. I think this was the fifth or sixth of 14 movies they ended up making.
Spencer Tracy was a big dramatic star, was not known for comedy, but he's hilarious in this. And Jean Harlow, who you could look, when looking back at it, you go, well, she's the least of the actors of the four in terms of her ability. She was huge, big box office and gets top billing in the movie.
SVW: And she's the original platinum blonde, but you know, I think this may be the only film I've seen of hers. And you were telling me before we started recording that... that she was a huge star and had done many big movies in the pre-code era.
DH: Yeah, pre-code is where she established not just her persona and she played this classic cliché. She always played either like a gold digger or a disreputable woman in some way. She's really the first sort of like platinum blonde on the screen. She did a movie called Platinum Blonde, which was a 1931 comedy directed by Frank Capra. pre-code comedy from Capra. She did a movie literally called Bombshell. And then Red Dust is maybe her most famous with Clark Gable. You've never seen Red Dust?
SVW: I have not seen Red Dust, no.
DH: And then Dinner at Eight later on in the 30s. she was really, really big box office. She may not be the greatest actor in the world, but she's got great screen presence.
SVW: And this movie starts with the classic stop the presses scene.
DH: Yeah, it's great. I mean, it's like. This is the newspaper part of it. You literally see the presses and the supervisor on the New York Evening Star, the name of the movie, the name of the newspaper in the movie, literally does the stop the presses thing because they realize they just printed a false story about this super rich girl, Connie Allenberry, saying that she broke up a marriage. But unfortunately, a few of the newspapers have already been delivered and one of them makes its way to the rich girl, Myrna Loy, and her father, who's the great character actor Walter Connolly. We recently did a show on It Happened One Night, probably the original great screwball comedy of the era. Walter Connolly is the one who plays Claudette Colbert’s father in that. He's a character, he's specialized in that kind of thing. So they sue the newspaper for libel, hence the title, Libeled Lady, for $5 million, which is an astronomical sum in the 1930s. And in comes now Spencer Tracy, who's the managing editor of the paper. And he's just about to get married to his blonde bombshell girlfriend, Jean Harlow. And he has to cancel the marriage
SVW: For the multiple, you know, she makes a point of saying, telling us how many times he's canceled their marriages, right?
DH: Because he loves the newspapers business more than he loves her. Apparently he digs up an old reporter played by William Powell, who's not old, but former reporter, a guy he fired. who appears to specialize in putting out these kind of fires, like when the newspapers get in legal trouble.
SVW: And when they have to track him down, he's been traveling from not just from place to place in the United States, but in different countries, where apparently he's sort of burning bridges at every place that he visits.
DH: Right, and he's actually completely broke, but he acts like he has a lot of money and doesn't need the job, so he worms his way into getting paid a lot by...Spencer Tracy, but they need him because they need someone who can help bail the paper out of this huge lawsuit. And they come up with this scheme together that what they'll do is they'll entrap Myrna Loy, the rich girl, they'll trap her with an actual married man. So that'll look so bad that you'll have to drop the lawsuit because it'll look like, she really is a bad girl. And William Powell will. this fired reporter, will now act. He'll be he'll act the part of the married man. But the question is, who is he going to marry? He has to be legally married in order to pull this off, in order to win the court in court. And so guess what Spencer Tracy does? Literally in the first scene, he's married. He's in a top hat and a tuxedo. Jean Harlow is in her wedding dress and they're about to get married and he cancels it because of this crisis. Well, of course he volunteers her. You'll marry my girlfriend. You'll do the thing where we entrap the rich girl. And then you'll get a quick divorce and then I can finally get married to my girlfriend. Jean Harlow, of course, is really mad, but she goes along with it because she thinks maybe if I just let him burn this one last thing out of his system with a stupid newspaper, he'll finally have to follow through and marry me. But, then things get complicated because of course, this being a screwball comedy, Myrna Loy and William Powell, the reporter and the rich girl, actually fall in love and he decides he can't go through with the plan. So he starts kind of subverting the plan. And even though they have a fake marriage, Jean Harlow and William Powell are having to pretend they're newlyweds. He's so nice to her, unlike her boyfriend, that she falls in love with him too.
SVW: And Myrna Loy and William Powell meet when they're on the ocean voyage going from Europe back to the United States. And you were talking about different sub-genres. There's also sort of that movie that takes place on an ocean going boat, bringing people together and there's scenes there and that's how they come together. Although she's not totally sold on him, he's still selling himself.
DH: She's been approached by lots of men, learn, young men who have some kind of idea but ultimately seem to be after her money.
SVW: But once they get back to the US and he's spending more time with her and also with her father, they both sort of fall for him.
DH: Yeah, I mean he begins to seem genuine even though he's faking all kinds of stuff. Like the father absolutely loves fly fishing so William Powell who knows absolutely nothing about it takes his crash course in how to fly fish. That's where we get into a bunch of the physical comedy and slapstick that really characterizes this as a screwball comedy.
SVW: And I'm imagining that these were some of the scenes that got the biggest laughs in the the theaters.
DH: Almost certainly. I mean, the first one is when he gets fishing lessons in the hotel room.
SVW: And Gene Harlow is essentially the fish or a log or a rock.
DH: Right, right. So she gets hooked and all that. But then the big one is when they actually, when he goes fishing with the rich girl and her father with Myrna Loy and William Connolly and Paul goes fishing and there's all this crazy slapstick comedy in the trout stream.
SVW: Yeah, and I was interested, that was an on location part of the movie, I'm guessing, or was that in a studio? Did they mimic? I couldn't figure that out as I was watching it.
DH: I didn't look it up. I mean, obviously this is a studio production. It looks like there's too much water. Yeah, it looks like it had to be on an actual river. But it was probably a little stream not far from, it was probably near Hollywood or something. I don't know. And I was actually looking to see how many of these shots, is it really William Powell falling and hitting boulders and stuff in the stream or are they using a double? And I think they were mostly using a double. There's a couple scenes towards the end of this trout stream. This is classic, know, way Hollywood studio stuff works. You see they're in a real stream and then all of a sudden you see they go to like a too close, two shot of them. And now the stream is rear projection and they're obviously shooting it in a studio.
SVW: And William Powell, his aura, you know, he is a great movie star, a great movie actor.
DH: Very much forgotten now, I think, by many people.
SVW: But he has a persona that is just spot on from movie to movie.
DH: Yeah, he’s a great actor and he did some pretty serious stuff, too.
SVW: Now, this movie also has some great lines in it.
DH: Yeah, this is, mean, there's very fast, you know, the characteristic rapid dialogue from the screwball comedies and great writing. Spencer Tracy and Gene Harlow are constantly speaking incredibly fast to each other. But yeah, I wrote down a couple of the lines from the movie. Like when he's about to get married, a couple of the reporters at the paper, one of them goes, “we can't break up his wedding.” And the other one says, “if we don't, it's our funeral.” When he's trying to defend, when he's talking, Spencer Tracy's talking about Gene Harlow and how he has a say in her life after she's married William Powell. He says, “she may be his wife, but she's engaged to me.” At one point, Spencer Tracy's arguing with Jean Harlow. He's like, “do you want me to kill myself?” And she says, “did you change your insurance?”
SVW: Yeah, and then there's also a reference to headlines. “What headline? I don't care. War threatens Europe. Which country? Flip a nickel.” And of course, this is 1936. So we know what's going on in Europe at that time. Well, and then talk about, you know, one of the reasons maybe that I haven't seen a Gene Harlow film is the fact that she made a spate of movies early on, but she didn't live very much longer after this movie was made in 1936.
DH: No, was a tragic story. mean, Gene Harlow, she's 25 in this movie. She was dead at 26, nine months after this movie. She only made two more movies after this. And the second, the last one that she was in, Saratoga, she actually fell sick and died before they finished shooting. It was...I don't know the details, it was some kind of kidney ailment. It's been listed at a lot of different things, uremia. It sounds like something that had it happened today, they would have caught it.
SVW: Now, Live Old Lady, 1936, was this a big successful film? You were talking about all the fact that it was a big A-list movie.
DH: Oh, I think so. I think it's always, it's one of the top ones. know, this movie, the same year this movie was My Man Godfrey with William Powell and Carol Lombard.
SVW: Now, this is a great screwball comedy and in terms of this is the first time I've seen this. Where does this fit in terms of the sort of the lineage of screwball comedies?
DH: By lineage, do you mean ranking?
SVW: Yeah, in terms of like, mean, bringing up baby, his girl Friday, there's also screwball comedies that spring to mind. And I had never heard of this until you suggested it.
DH: And that's why I suggested it because for people that know classic Hollywood movies like the two you just mentioned and the Philadelphia story and it happened one night. These are ones that everyone remembers. Liable Lady maybe not as much now, but it was just as big and if you read the critics on it, it’s considered one in the pantheon of the great screwball comedies.
SVW: All right, well thanks for joining us.
DH: Thanks, Scott.
