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The opposite poles are the teeming newsroom and the bourgeois hall that echoes, the latter is measured with a tracking shot and a quip. ("How about carfare back to the front door?") The protagonist is a proudly plebeian reporter and stumped playwright, embodied by Robert Williams like a mixture of Lee Tracy snap and Bing Crosby sleepiness, a model for Bill Murray. His latest assignment involves blackmailed Long Island bluebloods, he's unmoved by bribes but takes a shine to the "queenly" nose of the heiress (Jean Harlow). "That little schnozzle is the berries," he sighs to his overlooked gal-pal (Loretta Young), so smitten that a rival tabloid scoops him on his own wedding. The socialite's experiment "like a giraffe marrying a monkey," the eagle in the gilded cage is Frank Capra's metaphor of choice. Silhouetted against a shimmering fountain, Cinderella Man declares his beliefs (cf. Shelton's Bull Durham), fancy garters are readily fastened to saggy socks, "a symbol of my independence." Drawing rooms and sliding rugs, the stuck typewriter and the Zen of putter, "Just a Gigolo" answered by a knock to the jaw. A seduction of composition to match the vibrancy of Robert Riskin's dialogue, a screen humming with sketches for It Happened One Night and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. Hopscotching in the aristocratic mausoleum, then a raucous shindig with consequences for Viridiana and The Servant. "Is there any finishing school we could send him to?" "Yes. Sing Sing." Snazzy pleasures abound, from Halliwell Hobbes' Swiftian polish as the butler who lets out a soft "whooopeee!" to Walter Catlett's lovely rendition of a newspaper ninny to the comely rawness of the two leading ladies before they would have been made to switch roles. With Reginald Owen, Edmund Breese, Louise Closser Hale, and Don Dillaway. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |