White Woman (1933)

The pre-code era gave birth to a whole sub-genre of outrageous lust in the jungle melodramas in tropical settings. Kongo (1932) may have been the most outrageous of them all but when it comes to pure unadulterated sleaze Paramount’s 1933 offering White Woman is hard to beat.

Carole Lombard is Judith Denning, an American widow eking out a living as a singer in a native bar in Malaya. Or at least that’s what she was doing until it was made clear to her that she was no longer welcome anywhere in the colony. Judith’s husband had shot himself and although she was not charged it’s obvious that there was a strong suspicion that her adultery had driven him to suicide and that she might even have been guilty of more than adultery. That was enough to make her persona non grata but singing in a native bar was the icing on the cake. There really isn’t anywhere for Judith to go since the scandal of her husband’s suicide is going to follow her so when Horace H. Prin (Charles Laughton) asks her to marry him she accepts.

Cockney Prin is a wealthy trader and planter known as the King of the River. He’s debauched and middle-aged and Judith is obviously repelled by him but at the time it seems like the best offer she’s likely to get. So she marries him and they set off for his home in the jungle, a large river steamer decorated in the kind of expensive bad taste you’d expect from a man who started life in the gutter. Spiritually Prin has never left the gutter. He is a bizarre specimen of humanity gone very wrong and he rules his petty kingdom like an oriental despot.

Whether the suspicions attached to Judith’s past life are justified or not it’s obvious that she does not take her marriage vows the slightest bit seriously. Pretty soon she is canoodling with Prin’s overseer David von Elst (Kent Taylor). This simply amuses Prin. He knows he holds all the cards. All the men who work for him have one thing in common - they have no choice. They all have some dirty secret in their past, a dirty secret that Prin knows about and uses gleefully and with sadistic relish. In von Elst’s case it’s cowardice - he deserted from his regiment some years earlier in shameful circumstances. Prin is if anything quite pleased that Judith and von Elst have fallen for each other. If offers him the opportunity for some sadistic entertainment.

The first sign of real trouble comes with the arrival of a new overseer, Ballister (Charles Bickford). Ballister is not afraid of Prin, in fact he’s openly contemptuous. For Prin this offers a new and even more amusing challenge but perhaps this time he has found someone who will call his bluff.

The real trouble starts when two native chiefs arrive to complain about Prin’s shoddy trade goods. Prin insults them in a manner that is outrageous even by his standards. Pretty soon the jungle drums are beating and rebellion is in the air. Prin still believes he is in control, and so he is, for a while. But events are spiralling out of control.

The jungle settings are superbly realised. This movie looks quite lavish in a decadent degenerate sort of way.

Charles Laughton’s performance is deliriously over-the-top even by Laughton standards. When this is combined with one of the most ludicrous moustaches in film history and some  outlandish costumes the results could easily have been mere high camp silliness but Laughton adds a very real sense of viciousness to his characterisation. Prin is a ridiculous figure, but a very dangerous one as well, and his insane over-confidence makes the situation truly explosive.

Charles Bickford shows he can match Laughton when it comes to over-acting. The exchanges between Laughton and Bickford are the movie’s greatest strength - these two actors bounce off one another with magnificent zest.

With Laughton and Bickford in full flight Carole Lombard is inevitably overshadowed. Her performance is good but she’s simply outgunned. Surprisingly, given that Lombard was on the verge of becoming the queen of screwball comedy, she doesn’t try to counter Laughton with wisecracks. It’s obvious that at this stage of her career no-one had yet recognised her supreme comedic talent, which is a pity since a few wisecracks delivered in inimitable Lombard fashion would have enlivened her performance.

Kent Taylor is even more completely overshadowed although he’s competent enough.

The Universal Vault Series made-on-demand DVD is barebones but it offers an extremely good transfer. 

This is real pre-code territory and there’s plentiful sexual innuendo and a general atmosphere of sleaze and depravity that is still quite startling. White Woman positively wallows in sleaze. With Laughton giving one of the most delightfully excessive performances of a delightfully excessive career and Bickford equally over-the-top the result is a deliciously overheated melodrama. Highly recommended.

Swing High, Swing Low (1937)

I’ve enjoyed all the Carole Lombard-Fred MacMurray screwball comedies that I’ve seen (and I've seen most of them) but I must confess that Swing High, Swing Low came as something of a surprise. This is not a standard screwball comedy but an odd mix of genres. It’s not a complete success but it’s certainly not without interest.

Released by Paramount in 1937 the movie certainly starts out in screwball comedy territory. Maggie King (Carole Lombard) is on a ship passing through the Panama Canal, on her way to meet her future husband. She meets Skid Johnson, a soldier and part-time trumpet player. In true romantic comedy fashion she dislikes him at first. And she hates the trumpet. The trumpet can never be romantic. Skid takes this as a challenge and proceeds to prove to her that the trumpet can indeed by romantic, and in the process he wins her heart. Unfortunately he also gets her mixed up in a bar-room brawl and as a result she misses her ship. She’s now stranded in Panama.

Skid’s pal Harry (Charles Butterworth) assures that that there’s no problem. She can move in with them. She can have the bedroom; they’ll bed down in the living room. Their living quarters betray the fact that this is the abode of two bachelors. Maggie sets about cleaning up the place. She also sets about changing Skid’s life. She persuades him to get a job (he’s now left the army) playing trumpet in Murphy’s Bar. They turn out to be a very successful double act. She’s not the world’s greatest singer but Skid is a dynamite trumpet player.



The only fly in the ointment is an old girlfriend of Skid’s, Anita Alvarez (Dorothy Lamour). Nonetheless Skid and Maggie are soon married and everything is going great. That is until Skid’s success throws a spanner into the works. He is offered a job playing at the prestigious El Greco club in New York. His new agent tells her that they only want Skid, but not to worry, he’ll go to New York alone and send for her later.

Up till now it’s been classic screwball comedy all the way, with Lombard and MacMurray delightful as always and getting some fine support from Charles Butterworth (one of those wonderful character actors who enlivens any film he appears in). But now the movie changes gears abruptly and dramatically.



From this point on there will be no more laughs as the movie heads into romantic melodrama territory. Skid is a big success in New York but he achieves his success as part of a double act with Anita Alvarez. Alvarez’s scheming is intended to break up Skid’s marriage and it doesn’t take long for her efforts to succeed. Maggie is forgotten as Skid and Anita live the high life in the Big Apple. Finally Maggie can stand it no longer and she heads off for New York.

What she finds will shatter her dreams. She rings Anita’s hotel room in the middle of the night and Skid answers the phone. She draws the obvious conclusion and files for divorce.

Skid hadn’t really meant to abandon Maggie, but he’s a rather weak character and having a wife just sort of slipped his mind.



Maggie’s filing for divorce hits Skid hard and he turns to the bottle. He goes from the top of the pile to the bottom. Soon he’s a hopeless alcoholic, broke and out of work and wishing only for oblivion. He has one last chance, a radio broadcast that had been arranged weeks earlier. No-one believes that this down-and-out drunk will even be able to stand up much less play the trumpet. Only one thing can save him, and that’s Maggie. But will she give him another chance?

The switch from light-hearted romantic comedy to tragic romantic melodrama is very abrupt, perhaps too abrupt. Lombard and MacMurray excelled at comedy but neither was known for their abilities as dramatic performers (although MacMurray would of course go on to play dramatic roles with considerable success in the 40s). They handle the change of pace surprisingly well, in fact well enough to save the movie from disaster. The movie’s biggest asset proves to be the excellent cast.



Lombard did her own singing in this movie and she proves herself to be reasonably capable. The duet she does with MacMurray on trumpet, I Hear a Call To Arms, is in many ways the core of the movie expressing as it does their love in good times and in bad. As well as being a comedy and a drama this is also a musical and the musical numbers are pretty good, Dorothy Lamour’s spirited rendition of Panamania being a highlight. The musical content should come as no great surprise since the screenplay was co-written by none other than Oscar Hammerstein II.

Mitchell Leisen directs with his customary assurance.

Swing High, Swing Low has fallen into the public domain and although it’s easy enough to find copies finding a decent print is virtually impossible. This is an odd but interesting little movie and it really deserves to be rescued from this neglect and given a good DVD release. Despite its schizophrenic nature this movie is definitely worth a look.

Nothing Sacred (1937)

Nothing Sacred is a screwball comedy with a big problem. And it’s very easy to pinpoint the problem. The problem is Fredric March. There’s a reason Fredric March is not remembered as a great comic actor. He wasn’t even a mediocre comic actor. He wasn’t a comic actor at all.

This 1937 Selznick International film has another problem. It’s not a screwball comedy at all. It’s a satire, and it’s a very leaden one. March’s dull as dishwater performance doesn’t quite kill this film but it goes close. Which is a pity since the Nothing Sacred had a lot of potential.



The basic idea is very promising. Wally Cook (March) is a New York newspaper reporter whose latest stunt has backfired badly. The rich sultan he’s been building up as a patron of the arts has been exposed as a fraud - he’s really a guy who runs a shoe-shine stand in Manhattan. Now Cook needs another big story and he needs it fast. He thinks he’s found it.

Hazel Flagg (Carole Lombard) is a young woman from a small town in Vermont called Warsaw. She’s dying of radium poisoning as a result of working in the town’s only industry, a watch factory. Taking Hazel to New York to spend her last weeks of this earth living the high life sounds like a sure-fire circulation booster and Cook’s editor agrees. The only problem is, Hazel isn’t dying of radium poisoning. She isn’t dying of anything. She’s as fit as a fiddle.



Her shonky doctor made a mistake and now he sees a way of getting even with the paper for not naming him the winner of a contest years earlier. Hazel just sees it as a way of getting out of Warsaw, Vermont. Of course the secret, that there’s nothing wrong with Hazel, can’t be kept indefinitely. And of course Wally Cook and Hazel fall in love.

Ben Hecht’s screenplay is another newspaper satire along the lines of his much-adapted play The Front Page. It has some of the wit of that earlier effort but at times it seems heavy-handed. Yes we know that newspaper editors and reporters are cynical and we know that the public is gullible but while the screenplay makes its point it really doesn’t have enough actual laughs. A big problem is that any good lines that are given to Fredric March are pretty much wasted so Lombard has to carry the comedy on her own. And no matter how gifted a comedienne she was (and she was very gifted indeed) even the funniest actress needs someone to strike sparks off and playing opposite Fredric March she might as well be playing opposite a showroom dummy.



You can’t help wondering just how good this movie might have been with a Cary Grant, or even a Fred MacMurray, as the male lead. March is not just boring, he’s entirely unconvincing as a reporter. He’s too strait-laced, too serious, too stodgy and too unfunny.

Lombard almost manages to save the movie, but every time Fredric March shows up the laughs dry up. You also can’t help wondering if William A. Wellman was the right director. Like March he takes things a bit too seriously.



For some utterly inexplicable reason the movie was shot in Technicolor. This is particularly unfortunate since the movie has fallen into the public domain and most prints floating around are terrible, and the dull faded colours just make the movie look more lifeless.

Despite its problems Nothing Sacred is by no means a total loss. Lombard is very good and once she hits her stride things pick up. It’s a moderately amusing movie but it’s certainly the classic of screwball comedy that its reputation would suggest.

Love Before Breakfast (1936)

Love Before Breakfast is not one of Carole Lombard’s better films, but even a second-rank Carole Lombard film is worth seeing. Lombard plays Kay Colby, and she has two men wanting to marry her. She’s more or less engaged to Bill Wadsworth (Cesar Romero) but she doesn’t seem entirely sure she wants to marry him.

The very rich Scott Miller (Preston Foster) is Wadsworth’s romantic rival, and Miller is so determined to get her he buys the company Wadsworth works for just so he can send his rival to Japan to get him out of the way. Miller then sets to work wooing Kay. Which is not an easy task. Kay thinks she hates Miller but it seems she might simply be trying to persuade herself she’s still in love with Bill.

When Scott finally decides that maybe it’s futile pursuing her Kay panics. She’s done everything possible to discourage him but when he actually becomes discouraged she’s devastated.

No matter how talented they might be a romantic comedy star needs a co-star they can strikes sparks off and this was perhaps particularly true of Lombard. In My Man Godfrey and Twentieth Century she found co-stars who were worthy of her in the persons of William Powell (to whom she had been married) and John Barrymore.

But in Hands Across the Table she found her ideal co-star in the perhaps slightly surprising person of Fred MacMurray. Lombard and MacMurray had a magical chemistry and were to be teamed again in The Princess Comes Across and the delightful True Confession.

That kind of chemistry is sadly lacking in Love Before Breakfast. Cesar Romero as Bill and Preston Foster as Scott just don’t have the necessary charisma to convince the audience that a woman like Carole Lombard would be interested in them.

The other problem is that Lombard’s talents, although impressive, were rather specialised. In a conventional romantic comedy she wasn’t really at her best. It was in the screwball comedy that she really bloomed, and in that particular style of movie she had no equal. Other actresses made one or two great screwball comedies (such as Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby) but Lombard was the queen of the screwball comedy. She needed to play a character with the madcap quality of the screwball comedy heroine and she needed a script with plenty of zaniness.

Love Before Breakfast is just a tiny bit too conventional to unleash the full Lombard potential.

Despite all these caveats Love Before Breakfast is still an entertaining and likeable movie, and Lombard puts everything she has into the performance. Just don’t expect the kind of sublime movie magic she and Fred MacMurray delivered in Hands Across the Table.

The movie is included in the superb Carole Lombard Glamour Collection DVD set, which is most definitely worth buying.

We're Not Dressing (1934)

If you were trying to come up with a really dumb idea for a movie then I think this one would be hard to beat. How about a romantic pairing of Bing Crosby and Carole Lombard in a musical version of J.M. Barrie’s play The Admirable Crichton? The strangest thing is, back in 1934 Paramount actually did it, under the title We're Not Dressing.

And it works in practice just as badly as you might anticipate.

Doris Worthington (Carol Lombard) is rich heiress Doris Worthington, cruising about on her luxury yacht with her dissipated Uncle Herbert. She has two princes (in reality little more than aristocratic gigolos) both wanting to marry her, but in fact she’s consumed with lust for one of the sailors (played by Bing Crosby).



The yacht is shipwrecked and the rich passengers find themselves dependent for survival on the sailor (Crosby). But there are several major variations from Barrie’s play. The humble sailor isn’t really a humble sailor, and Doris doesn’t really need his help to survive since she’s discovered the island is not uninhabited. There are two naturalists on the island (played by George Burns and Gracie Allen) and they supply her with the necessities for survival.

Where to start with the problems that afflict this picture? The first and most obvious one is that it’s a musical but Carole Lombard doesn’t sing. That means that every time there’s a moment when you expect the female lead to join the male lead in a duet Lombard is left looking like a fifth wheel because she can’t sing. At this stage Paramount clearly did not understand that Lombard was not an all-round actress who could be cast in any kind of picture. She had a peculiarly narrow talent that only bloomed when given the right kind of material. When she was given a suitable vehicle that talent bloomed spectacularly and delightfully, but this was most emphatically not the right vehicle.



Secondly, while Crosby and Lombard are quite good together when they’re just indulging in verbal sparring there is zero sexual chemistry between them. And Lombard was always at her best when there was a real spark between her and her leading man.

Thirdly, George Burns and Gracie Allen have been added for extra comic relief but they’re the most unfunny and most annoying comedy team in cinema history. When they’re onscreen the movie becomes almost unendurable. It’s a measure of just how irritating they are that Ethel Merman (as a gold digger hoping to snare rich Uncle Hubert) seems quite innocuous by comparison.



There’s also a pet bear who follows Bing Crosby about he’s still not enough to save this picture.

Cecil B. DeMille had made a terrific silent adaptation of Barrie’s play in 1919 with Gloria Swanson as the female lead, under the title Male and Female . DeMille’s film has all the wit and lightness of touch that We're Not Dressing so conspicuously lacks. The basic idea calls for a sophisticated comedic approach which is precisely what DeMille delivers in his movie and is precisely what We're Not Dressing fails to deliver.

There are occasional good moments and Lombard shows flashes of her special magic but the whole project is so ill-conceived that her best efforts are doomed to failure.



This is a pre-code movie and there’s some pre-code naughtiness, notably involving Carole Lombard’s underwear and a scene where Bing Crosby in a fit of sexual frustration and anger resorts to handcuffing Lombard to the wall of her hut, but somehow it still manages to fall rather flat. Mind you, the biggest problem I had was with George Burns and Gracie Allen who managed to ruin any enjoyment I might have got out of this picture. That may of course be merely a matter of personal taste.

The good news is that it’s a fairly short movie but this may well be the longest 74 minutes of your life.

It is at least different, and it's an interesting oddity.

The other good news is that the movie is included in the Carole Lombard Glamour Collection which includes some truly superb movies that make it a must-buy DVD set so you can regard We're Not Dressing as a bizarre bonus.

Twentieth Century (1934)

Since Twentieth Century was directed by the man who went on to become the unchallenged master of the screwball comedy, Howard Hawks, you’d expect that this 1934 Columbia movie might well be a very early example of the genre. And in fact it has most of the features you’d expect from this type of movie. And being a Howard Hawks movie you’d expect it to be very good, and you’d be right again.

John Barrymore is theatrical impresario Oscar Jaffe. He’s had a string of Broadway hits and he’s about to unveil his latest discovery, a young actress named Mildred Plotka (Carole Lombard). Although she’s not Mildred for long - he’s renamed her Lily Garland. Unfortunately she’s absolutely terrible and everyone who works for him is convinced he’s finally taken leave of his senses. They beg him to get rid of her but he stubbornly insists that she has the makings of a great Broadway star, possibly the greatest of them all.

Oscar is in fact quite mad, but he turns out to be correct. Before long Lili Garland is the toast of Broadway. And she and Oscar are lovers. But to say their love is tempestuous would be an understatement of colossal proportions. This is no tempest - it’s a full-blown hurricane. Eventually Lily walks out and then commits the most unforgivable of all sins - she goes to Hollywood.

Oscar’s career takes an immediate nosedive. His attempts to groom new stars fail dismally. He has a string of flops over the next couple of years, which culminates in having to flee Chicago in disguise to avoid his debtors. He boards the Twentieth Century Limited, the most famous train in North America, bound for New York. But as luck would have it, Lily Garland is aboard the same train. His faithful business partners encourage him to make the attempt to patch things up with Lily and sign he to a new contract, this being his only hope of avoiding complete financial ruin. Of course things don’t work out neatly.

Hawks is in complete command. The pacing is frenetic. Having a script by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur certainly doesn’t hurt either. Have much of the action take place on the train is another asset - I’ve always firmly believed you just can’t make a boring movie set on a train.

And then there’s the cast. The supporting players are fine, but the movie’s two biggest assets are Lombard and Barrymore. They’re superb and the sparks fly whenever they’re on screen together. Barrymore is particularly good - it’s an outrageous totally crazed performance and it demonstrates that he was absolutely perfect for the screwball comedy genre.

The theatrical background works nicely since both Oscar and Lily are completely artificial creations - they’re so much a part of the theatre world that they treat the whole of life as a stage performance.

There’s really not a single weakness to this movie. It’s a delight from start to finish.

The Princess Comes Across (1936)

I’m now more than halfway through the Carole Lombard Glamour Collection boxed set and I’m totally hooked on Lombard. Even in a movie as flawed and as odd as The Princess Comes Across her magic shines through.

This time she’s a Swedish princess, Princess Olga. Yes, Carole Lombard as a Swedish princess is a bit of a stretch but if you keep watching you’ll find that things are not quite as they appear. Lombard seems to be giving a good-natured impersonation of Greta Garbo which adds to the fun. Princess Olga is setting off on an ocean liner on a voyage to the United States where is to sign a contract to make motion pictures. The combination of royalty and Hollywood has endured a huge crowd to send her off and an equally enthusiastic reception is expected at the other end of her voyage

And she’s once again teamed with Fred MacMurray. The more I see of his guy’s early movies the more I like him. He really was a gifted comic actor and he and Lombard always have great chemistry. MacMurray is a band leader named King Mantell who takes a shine to Princess Olga. He serenades her with his concertina. And what girl can resist a man with a concertina?

The movie starts out as if it’s going to be a screwball comedy and then suddenly becomes a murder mystery. There’s nothing wrong with combining those two genres, it was done with outstanding success in The Thin Man (and Paramount were clearly hoping to emulate the success of that film) but in this case the results are awkward. It doesn’t quite make it in either genre.

The murder mystery plot concerns an escaped convict who has somehow found his way on to the ocean liner. He’s a master of disguise so he could be anyone. Conveniently the passenger list just happens to include five famous detectives from various parts of the world. They don’t make much headway catching the criminal and soon a corpse turns up so now things are getting very serious.

While all this is going on the band leader continues his romancing of the princess. There’s also a blackmail sub-plot, and it transpires that they both have something to hide.

It all sounds like it could work rather well but unfortunately there are problems. Neither the mystery sub-plot nor the romantic sub-plot are fully developed, and the mystery angle isn’t done with sufficient skill to really capture the viewer’s interest. There’s also not enough scope given to develop the romantic chemistry that Lombard and MacMurray demonstrated with so much sparkle in Hands Across the Table a year earlier.

So it ends up being a movie with very little going for it. But it does have Carole Lombard, and that’s enough. She has to more or less carry the movie single-handedly and she’s equal to the challenge. It’s a delightful performance and she makes this slightly odd movie well worth watching.

True Confession (1937)

For a lot of Hollywood actresses the policy of strictly enforcing the Production Code from mid-1934 onwards was a disaster, but not for everyone. For Carole Lombard it was an opportunity.

Lombard really found her niche in the screwball comedy. And the screwball comedy was a reaction to the Production Code. It was a way of making intelligent grown-up comedies whilst remaining within the Code guidelines, with zaniness replacing sexiness. And Lombard was ideally suited to this new genre.

Lombard is Helen Bartlett. Her husband Kenneth (Fred MacMurray) is struggling to make his mark as an attorney. Helen takes a job secretly but it turns out that when a job sounds too good to be true, it is too good to be true. Her boss, Otto Krayler, isn’t bothered by Helen’s lack of any typing or shorthand skills. He’s more interested in hanky-panky. Helen is shocked and after a scuffle she flees. But she has left her coat and her purse behind. She persuades her long-suffering best friend Daisy (Una Merkel who always seemed to play the heroine’s best friend) to company her on an expedition to retrieve these items.

While Helen looks for purse the police arrive and find something much more interesting. The find Otto Krayler’s corpse. And they find two promising suspects - Helen and Daisy. Daisy is soon ruled out, but Helen has a weakness that now gets her into big trouble. She is a congenital liar. Not in a malicious way but she is a would-be writer and her imagination gets away from her. The stories she tells the police are outlandish enough to get her charged with Otto’s murder.

It’s lucky her husband is an attorney. He defends her in court but the court case has unexpected outcomes. And there’s a wild card in this pack - a drunken criminologist named Charley Jasper (John Barrymore).

Lombard and MacMurray generate the same kind of romantic and comic chemistry that they generated in Hands Across the Table a couple of years earlier. MacMurray and Lombard had the perfect personas for screwball comedy and both had nice comic timing. John Barrymore demonstrates his comic skills, while Una Merkel turns in yet another funny, likeable, sexy performance. How was she never a bigger star?

Some American comedy of the 30s could get annoying but that’s never a problem here. Even with the minor characters.

There’s very little to dislike, and a great deal to love, in True Confession

High Voltage (1929)

The main claim to fame of High Voltage is that it provided Carole Lombard with one of her very early starring roles. Made in 1929, it’s a kind of romance thriller which, despite the title, fails to generate very much electricity.

A bus is stranded in a snow storm somewhere in the Sierra Nevadas (I think it’s the Sierra Nevadas, but my knowledge of American geography is very sketchy). The driver and passengers make it to a deserted church, where they discover a mysterious stranger (played by William Boyd) who offers no explanation for his presence there. Lombard is a escaped female prisoner being taken back to the penitentiary by a rather taciturn lawman. As the storm worsens they find themselves trapped, their whereabouts unknown, and with very little food. Tensions rise, and of course romance blossoms. Meanwhile the food supply dwindles, and one of the other passengers, a slightly innocent young woman, starts to sicken from lack of nutrition.

Lombard is reasonably good, and wisely doesn’t overdo the hard-bitten female convict routine. She’s a little on the cynical side, but she’s generous and likeable. The plot suffers from a rather hokey ending, but the main problem with the film is simply that it’s a very early talkie, with the clunkiness and slow pacing that afflicted the talkies until the technology improved and allowed the camera to start moving freely again.

It’s moderately entertaining, and it gives Carole Lombard fans the chance to see her in an early non-comedy role. It’s in the public domain so it’s easy enough to find cheap copies, or even free online copies, and as long as you don’t pay more than a couple of dollars for it and you don’t have excessively high expectations High Voltage is probably worth a look.