This is a big and very popular comedy from MGM. It's got four top stars, Jean Harlow, William Powell, Myrna Loy and Spencer Tracy. Since it's an MGM production the sets are elaborate and the fashions particularly the women's clothes are really glamorous. MGM wasn't the number one studio in the 1930's for nothing. If the film has a drawback it's with the screenplay that sets up a wacky situation and then doesn't seem to know how to resolve it.
Lets go to the videotape as they used to say. Myrna Loy is a heiress who has been wrongly slandered by managing editor Spencer Tracy's newspaper. Loy decides to sue the paper for five million dollars. Tracy gets the big idea to hire William Powell to set her up in an actual scandal. Throw in Tracy's fiancee played by Jean Harlow and you have lots of running around and lots of misunderstandings.
Libeled Lady is a screwball comedy since these top performers were put through some really silly situations.
This film has a real 1930's cast. Myrna Loy was a good looking performer who as it turned out was also a very good comedian. Spencer Tracy was one of MGM's top stars and was considered an actor's actor. Then there was the interesting case of William Powell and Jean Harlow. At the time of this film Powell and Jean Harlow were romantically involved. The romance didn't have a happy ending when Harlow died in 1937.
Watching
Libeled Lady today I was struck by the professionalism of the cast. Talk about squeezing blood out of a rock. This is not what I would call a film with a real clever and funny screenplay. However the actors milk every bit of humor out of the story that they can find. A measure of the unsatisfactory nature of the film is that the film literally just stops and fades to black without an ending.
The film was written by Maurine Dallas Watkins, Howard Emmett Rogers and George S. Oppenheimer.
The running time is 98 minutes.
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