Libeled Lady: they sure don’t make fluffy romantic comedies like they used to. I savored the amphetamine-rapid patter of dialogue forged in the fires of the ’30s; the comedic hits come fast and furious and I wished everyone I knew, myself included, spoke as quickly and with as much wicked cleverness as these characters.
William Powell steals the show as Bill Chandler, a Walt Disney-resembling pencil-mustachioed dandy, alternating between foppishly suave and stammering fall-down goof. He’s macking on Connie Allenbury (Myrna Loy), a rich socialite haughty enough to probably set cute baby chickens on fire with merely a glance. She’s suing the New York Evening Star for $5 million for printing a saucy bit of untrue gossip about her. The paper’s editor, Warren Haggerty (Spencer Tracy), thinks he can nullify the suit by getting a photo of her messing around with a married man, so he puts Chandler to the task—after having the dashing fellow temporarily marry his own fiancée, Gladys (a brassy, sassy Jean Harlow). Hilarity ensues.
At first this film shapes up to be perhaps the only romantic comedy featuring two couples that gives balanced plot-time and screen-time to everyone, which practically never works (like in, say, You’ve Got Mail; although maybe Sideways comes close). But the focus grows to be Chandler and Allenbury genuinely falling for each other, but not before he makes a comic ass of himself. There’s a long bit wherein, attempting to ingratiate himself with Allenbury’s fishing-fanatic father, he pretends to know how to angle for trout. Then the father invites Chandler’s on a fishing trip with himself and his daughter. Whuh-oh! Bring on the physical comedy: lots of Chandler falling down in the rapids and grasping at the slippery fish just out of his reach.
Hello, Hollywood: this movie totally begs for a remake, particularly given the continued prevalence of tabloids skirting legal lines and debutante romance. Yes, it was remade [only 10 years later!] in ’46 as Easy to Wed, but I’m talking a remake now. Additionally I ask: why has not Myrna, as in Myrna Loy, become the new hotness in names for baby girls? It’s got that foxiness-by-association that other old-timey names like Ethel somehow haven’t been able to retain.