NR | 1h 17min | Drama, Comedy | 1937
Director William A. Wellman’s screwball comedy playfully spoofs scams and scamsters, and the phony tabloids and their readers who love the scams and scammers.
Wallace/Wally Cook (Fredric March) ruins his reputation as star journalist for the New York Morning Star when one of his lead stories turns out to be a hoax. Livid and humiliated, newspaper boss Oliver Stone (Walter Connolly) removes Cook from the “land of the living,” which in broadsheet parlance means he’s shunted to sepulchral duties as Obituary Editor.
Given a second chance, a chastened Cook then rushes to the laid back (fictional) New England village of Warsaw searching for a real story. Newspapers claim that two persons there have died, reportedly from radium poisoning, and a third, the pretty young Hazel Flagg, (Carole Lombard) is also dying. Well, except, she isn’t. Only her fatherly friend Dr. Downer (Charles Winninger) and she know that his alleged diagnosis as her alleged doctor is also something of a hoax.
But it’s too late to go public. Cook’s smitten by Flagg, unaware that she’s not as ill as he thinks. Fancying her as much as the headlines her plight will trigger, he whisks her off to New York. She’s been … er … dying to visit anyway and plays along. To ensure she says farewell on a high note, Cook and Stone have arranged for her to receive a ticker tape parade, the key to the city from the mayor himself, and the most convincing tears that New York City can muster.
Soon, the Morning Star’s mascot of mourning becomes the toast of the Big Apple, but only she and Downer see red. What if the city discovers that its sniffles have been for nothing? Decorated she may be, but the damsel begins to worry; is she doomed because she’s dying or because she isn’t?
Wellman weaves in some hilarious scenes. Cook, asking a stranger in Warsaw to direct him to Flagg, is greeted with monosyllables. With mock politeness, Cook tetchily prefaces his next request with, “If you aren’t worn out talking.”
Lovable Lombard
Like many producers in the late 1930s, David O. Selznick turned to a screwball comedy to cheer audiences still wrestling with The Great Depression. He turned to Wellman, who’d worked his magic on Selznick’s earlier, more studied biopic, “A Star is Born” (also 1937). Selznick commissioned Sam Berman as title designer for his new film after seeing his work as cartoonist-illustrator for Mark Hellinger’s New York Daily Mirror column, “Goin’ to Town.” Berman’s opening credits set the playful tone with cartoons, and cartoonish figurines of its stars. March’s, in particular, bears a sly wink.
Some of the gags don’t quite land but Lombard pulls others off with her formidable star power, comic timing, and charm. March, renowned more for his knowing gravitas, isn’t as well cast as a gullible newshound, but manages to pass off as a man who takes everyone seriously in a phony news cycle where no one is serious enough.
Adoring fans immortalized Lombard in their minds and memories when she was killed in a plane crash at age 33, just five years after she’d provoked smiles in this film by spoofing both dying and death.
Doubtlessly, this is her film. Watch how endearingly she gently nudges the corners of her lips into an open-mouthed grin. Cheekily again, she breaks the fourth wall at one point. She turns to the camera (and the audience) in the middle of a cocktail party that’s pompously marking her supposed fortitude amid her supposedly impending death. Then, she delivers a throwaway line that’s at once startling and soothing, “Oh please, please, let’s not talk shop.”
