Musicomedies of the Week

(2 of 3)

Baby Face (Warner) is notable mainly because, when the Hays organization ordered portions of it changed, it caused one of the studio rows between Darryl Zanuck and Harry Warner as a result of which Zanuck quit Warners, formed a new company called Twentieth Century Pictures, Inc. to release films through United Artists. A morose and timidly salacious study of the life and loves of a saloon keeper's daughter (Barbara Stanwyck), it shows her flirting to get a job in a bank, rolling an eye at the department manager, arousing the lower nature of the cashier, finally having an affair with the vice president. The cashier shoots the vice president and himself, leaving Lily Powers to marry the president. Most spurious shot: Lily's change of heart in the last reel— when she has deserted her president-husband and started for Paris with most of the funds which he needs to save himself from jail.

Hold Your Man (MGM). Jean Harlow is the pattern for every U. S. dance hall hostess whose hair responds to dye. Clark Gable is the apotheosis of the heel.* They therefore constitute an ideal starring team for a picture, of which the aim is to romanticize the love life of a Brooklyn strumpet and a petty thief.

Eddie Hall (Clark Gable) is first seen scampering up a flight of brownstone steps to get away from a policeman. He scuttles into the first convenient room, which contains Jean Harlow taking a bath. There begins almost immediately a courtship conducted, as is customary in such cine mas, by means of cohabitation. Unfortunately, before Eddie and Ruby (Jean Harlow) have had time to become less intimately acquainted, he attempts a feat of larceny too difficult for his abilities.

When he gets out of jail, Eddie decides to try the badger game. He has Ruby invite a married admirer to the apartment, plans to break in on the couple in time to practice blackmail. Instead, overcome by jealousy, he whacks the caller on the jaw so hard he dies. Eddie runs away, Ruby goes to the reformatory. Eddie visits her, persuades an elderly colored clergyman calling on his wayward daughter to marry them in the institution's chapel. Their wedding, with policemen who have gotten wind of Eddie's presence pounding on the door, is the high point of the story. The closing shot shows Ruby and her son, who is older than he ought to be, waiting to meet Eddie when he returns from Sing Sing. She has secured for him a job in Cincinnati. He has promised to go straight.

All this is fundamentally as absurd as it sounds but much less vicious. Actually, the hero and heroine of Hold Your Man resemble characters from the Morte d'Arthur much more than their counterparts in life. The picture is based on the shrewd supposition that cinemaddicts derive a pleasant reassurance from detecting—in persons with whom they can identify themselves—noble motives for bad deeds. The fact that it is completely insincere does not imply that it was inefficiently written, by Anita Loos, directed, by Sam Wood, or acted, by Hollywood's foremost specialists in sex. It contains a few definitely first-rate shots—such as the one of Eddie, when he gets back from jail for the first time, jumping out of a taxi and glancing up to the windows of his apartment to see if anyone is there.