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Love, a capitalist story. The calm center of the bustling office is the executive secretary (Claudette Colbert), for six years smitten with the stuffy tycoon (Melvyn Douglas) who longs for some efficient management back home. Invited over for dinner, she impresses mightily by confronting his "professional pallbearer" of a sister (Katharine Alexander) and taming his unruly daughter (Edith Fellows) with an off-screen spanking. ("The first music I've heard in this house in months," says the paterfamilias of the girl's yelps.) A not quite romantic proposal follows, sandwiched between the groom's obtuse quoting of Shakespeare and his needing the butler's help carrying the bride over the threshold and up to her separate room. Business and marriage together "sound like an incorporation," with a deft hand Gregory La Cava dismantles both. The husband wants the same assistant at work and in the drawing room, no match for the playboy (Michael Bartlett) who coos Colbert by singing "Parlez-moi d'Amour" by the piano. (No brat but an imaginative imp, the daughter responds with her own tinkly rhymes, including one that could be an anthem for many a La Cava heroine: "I don't want to go to bed, I'm having too much fun!") Conformity here is a matter of playacting best tolerated while under the influence, the suggestive central anecdote has the mock-couple full of champagne and mingling with a family of mannequins—the ersatz ideal of expressionless effigies brought down with slurred singalongs and put on display for the benefit of Sirk. "I'm sure I could learn to like you, if you were roasted." Nichols appropriately adjusts it to the stock-exchange Eighties (Working Girl). With Raymond Walburn, Jean Dixon, Clara Kimball Young, and Grace Hayle. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |