1936 - LIBELED LADY, a big MGM all star comedy

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.   

1938 - A YANK AT OXFORD, making them the way MGM likes them.

A Yank At Oxford holds the distinction of being the first MGM film to be filmed in England instead of some studio set in Hollywood.  This is MGM at it's most typical, a good production and utter blandness in story content.  After all the studio didn't want to upset it's American or British audiences.

Robert Taylor is the cocky American student who excels at athletics.  He ends up getting a scholarship to study at Oxford and runs into the usual cultural differences that result when you mix the British and those darn Yanks together.  Honestly you could write this film in your sleep and considering the six writers I believe I counted in the titles they probably did.

The film if it has any interest at all is seeing Vivian Leigh in an early role before her breakout performance in Gone With The Wind.   

An empty film kind of a waste of time.

102 minutes, written by Roland Pertwee, John Monk Saunders, Leon Gordon, Sidney Gilliat, Michael Hogan, Angus MacPhail, John Paddy Carstairs, Malcolm Stuart Boylan, Walter Ferris, George Seligman Oppenheimer, Frank Wead and F. Scott Fitzgerald (huh).

1940 - Manly BOOM TOWN is very turgid stuff towards the end

  Boom Town is the kind of junk MGM would frequently dump on audiences. MGM the Cadillac of the Hollywood studio studio system during the 1940's, had the biggest stars and the best production facilities. Essentially a movie studio run as an assembly line factory. MGM would pump out films like this that had an alarming blandness. Talent in front and behind the camera were expected to breath life into this boring formula stuff.

 

MGM re teamed Clark Gable, and Spencer Tracy to duplicate the success of San Francisco, as further insurance, they cast Claudette Colbert who had had a big hit with Gable in It Happened One Night. Boom Town, starts out as a good natured entertainment about oil wildcatters. Gable and Tracy are fighting, drinking and feuding buddies trying to get rich bringing in oil wells. A woman comes between them and millions of miles of plot later Gable ends up as a rich oil tycoon who is cheating on his nice all American wife with the exotic Heddy Lamarr.

A big fistfight ensues where Tracy beats Gable into insensibility so he can see the error of his ways and go back to sweet bland wife Claudette Colbert. In the meantime, to oppose a big oil consortium, Gable creates a monopoly which brings him to the attention of the US government who puts him on trial. Tracy his on again off again friend, delivers a speech to the jury basically saying Gables monopoly is good for American business and the American people (MGM was a very conservative studio) Boom Town ends with the friends reuniting to start a new business.

Of note in the movie is the ridiculous and constant use of back screen projection and studio sets anytime the stars are involved, not one bit of realism is allowed to enter into the fantasy world of MGM. To even film on location would take away a piece of control from MGM. The cast is kind of interesting.

Frank Morgan shows up from time to time, as a sort of a best friend of Gable and Tracy, it's always hard to think of him in other roles since he is most closely associated with his role as the wizard in The Wizard of Oz. Claudette Colbert a woman who had played a lot of sexy interesting parts at Paramount in the 1930's here finds herself in the thankless role of the wife of Clark Gable. In the world of MGM, American housewives are sexless and boring. European actor Heddy Lamarr gets to play the dirty woman with the sex appeal who Gable has a fling with, she's in the movie so the middle class audience can enjoy her naughtiness while being smug and superior about her loose European morals.

Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy were fine actors and one has to give them credit for being able to breath any sort of life into this film. This is the kind of film that drives a dedicated film viewer to watching European movies with subtitles.

Written by John Lee Mahin, the running time is 119 minutes.