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A swanky MGM veneer for the George S. Kaufman-Edna Ferber play, with Depression ruination and death in the ritzy proscenium wings. "Everybody's broke, darling. Don't let that worry you." The bourgeois gathering is a Viking funeral in disguise, organized by a whirlwind nitwit (Billie Burke) too worried about sitting arrangements to notice her husband (Lionel Barrymore) sweating over clogged arteries and plunging stocks. A penthouse bull (Wallace Beery) embodies the ruthless corporate stance, his "alley cat" doll (Jean Harlow) is a social-climber lolling around in satin and half-eaten bonbons, "I'm going to be a lady if it kills me!" Others on the guest list include Marie Dressler's strapped stage matron (she once was offered grand-dame roles, "now I wish I'd taken a sandwich"), and John Barrymore's fallen matinee idol, contemplating his descent from star to bit player while holed up in a hotel room. A deluxe flipbook of caricatures, an unabashed pageant of studio thoroughbreds, a study of tuxedoed, bejeweled pretense. Just about every character is a performer, silly and vain and desperate, and George Cukor adores their histrionic brio: Dressler is still a Sennett bulldozer under the furs and veils, while Art Deco elegance heightens the combustible truculence of Beery and Harlow. Above all is the bitter humor John Barrymore mines from a burned-out swain's struggle to remain lordly in a tangle of broken romances, whiskey bottles and showbiz indignities. "Go get yourself buried," his agent (Lee Tracy) sneers, Barrymore does so in grandly theatrical fashion—fireplace and mirror and tilted lamp, a mise en scène adjusted to better capture the sagging aquiline profile (cp. A Star Is Born). The leonine aspic is dropped on the floor, and six years later there's La Règle du Jeu. With Edmund Lowe, Madge Evans, Jean Hersholt, Karen Morley, Louise Closser Hale, May Robson, and Grant Mitchell. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |