I watched two of the films on the set, both featuring Fred MacMurray (best known to modern audiences from "My Three Sons" or maybe The Absent-Minded Professor) as her comic foil. One was really terrific, an overlooked screwball gem, and the other was ridiculously awful. I have no way of knowing how this bodes for the four other movies on the set I didn't get to check out. (Those, by the way, would be Love Before Breakfast, Man of the World, The Princess Comes Across and We're Not Dressing.)
Hands Across the Table
A film of considerable charms, Hands Across the Table lacks only the maniacally sharp wit of Preston Sturges, the Master of the Screwball genre. In just about every other way, this is as good as screwball gets, a wry and even insightful farce about the relative merits of marrying for money vs. marrying for love.
Lombard plays impoverished manicurist Regi Allen, determined to meet a wealthy husband via working on nails. It seems, to me, a poor choice for a girl looking to meet lots of men. I mean, manicurist? Aren't you going to meet 50 times more women than men at that job, even in the late 30's? I suppose, on the bright set, it's a fairly exclusive group of men who stay in fancy hotels and then call downstairs for manicures, so at least you're filtering out all the broke slobs.
So does manage to impress the rich but differently-abled Allen Macklyn (Ralph Bellamy), but doesn't really consider him a genuine marriage prospect. (As played by Bellamy, he's kind of creepy. I can imagine an alternate version of this film, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, in which eh secretly plots to murder Regi and hide her body in the false bottom of his wheelchair.)
Unfortunately for her financial prospects, Regi quickly blows off the goofball Theodore Drew (MacMurray), finding him dreadfully unserious, before realizing he's the heir to a massive family fortune.
Due to circumstances it's not at all neccessary to elaborate on, Drew will come to stay in Regi's modest apartment, Macklyn will come to propose marriage, and everything will find a way of working out. Lombard and MacMurray have so much genuine chemistry here, however, that the movements of the story matter very little. The bulk of the film is taken up with the friendship between Regi and Ted, how their manic energy and self-absorption compliment each other perfectly.
As I said, the writing (by Norman Krasna, Vincent Lawrence and Herbert Fields) doesn't reach the sublime heights of The Lady Eve or My Man Godfrey, but perhaps this isn't a fair standard. It's far wittier than the average Hollywood comedy, and Lombard and MacMurray deliver the dialogue with exuberance and relish. One memorable exchange:
TED: My grandfather was a pirate, you know.
REGI: Honest?
TED: No...He was a pirate.
Okay, maybe you had to be there.
Anyway, these two are a real treat to watch together, not just a cute, charming couple, but an intelligent and fiery one. Which is why it's so surprising that their team-up in True Confession, only a few years later, was such a dud.
True Confession
Universal has dubbed these three sets of movies The Glamour Collection. It makes sense for Dietrich, certainly, and Carole Lombard was certainly a beautiful woman. But she's not exactly "glamorous" in these films. Instead, she brings a combination of girl-next-door relatability with a surprisingly rough edge sharpened over years of living in the Depression-era Big City. In Hands Across the Table, she has become hard and bitter, determined to enter a loveless marriage to avoid having to work on nails forever.
In True Confession, she's a housewife who's sick on living on her husband's meager salary, and in the course of trying to find work, she's lured into the apartment for a sex offender, who is then murdered after she flees to safety.
I mean, hey, it was the 30's. Times were tough. But, still, it's not exactly glamorous.
And though the movie's a waste of time - a comedy that's never funny, featuring some really over-the-top vaudeville-style schtick in place of actual humor - Lombard nonetheless does nice work as Helen Bartlett. A pathological liar, married to an uptight defense attorney who only represents the innocent (MacMurray again), Bartlett's as desperate as she is unpredictable. The performance is essentially note-perfect. We root for Helen even though she's pretty much a complete idiot who's married to an even larger idiot.
The story gets increasingly convoluted without ever building up any momentum as farce. Helen, suspected of the murder of her sleazy near-employer even though she had already fled the scene when he was killed, pleads guilty hoping for mercy from the court. And, of course, she can't reverse her testimony to tell everyone the truth, because her husband hates a liar! Meh...as a set-up, it's kind of thin.
But what really makes True Confession excruciating is John Barrymore, hamming it up as an egomaniacal drunk who watches Helen's trial unfold. For those not up on your 30's Hollywood trivia, Barrymore had been the biggest stage star of his generation, known as The Great Profile because of his striking good looks. But years of alcohol abuse (Barrymore hung out with Errol Flynn, the most notorious drunk in Hollywood history!) left him, by the late 30's, pretty much a physical wreck. He looks twice his age in True Confession, and would die five years later. And he's playing a ridiculously stereotypical "wacky drunk." It's just...grim.
I know that the makers of True Confession couldn't have known Barrymore would actually die from drink in five years. But they surely must have known that the character cut a bit close to home. I mean, Charley wouldn't be funny even if played by a man who never touched the stuff. It's just a dumb character with no purpose in the larger story. He stumbles around, makes an ass out of himself, repeats his unfunny prediction that Helen will fry, and then wanders off-camera. Why even bother?
So, okay, if you happen upon the Carole Lombard collection, might want to skip True Confession and go for Hands Across the Table. That is all.
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