Of all the things I was expecting from The Love Test (1935), feminism was not one of them.
Actually, I had no particular expectations of this movie; I watched it because it was the earliest film I had run across by Michael Powell—one of seven he directed in the next-to-last year of his speedrun of an apprenticeship through the quota quickie mines of the Cinematograph Films Act 1927—and I recognized favorably several of the cast. The premise did not sound promising. In a laboratory full of research chemists all bent on the grail of non-flammable celluloid, the chief chemist has tendered his stress-induced resignation and recommended as his successor not the chest-beater with seniority already accepting congratulations from his cronies, but the proto-boffin barely raising her head from her researches as the temperature of office gossip rises around her, the ineluctably geeky but nevertheless female Mary Lee (Judy Gunn). Outraged at the prospect of being passed over for "a girl," cut-rate Iago Thompson (David Hutcheson) proposes to use the month to discredit her by distracting her from her work with a love affair, and because mild-mannered John Gregg (Louis Hayward) is the one man in the lab who defends and isn't threatened by her, he's cheated into being nominated for the part of the cad. A chart is drawn up to record his progress with a woman generally agreed to possess "the appeal of a Bunsen burner." From the title and the dreamy orchestral music over which the camera glided through the glassware of the lab, we are watching a romantic comedy.
I could and did envision some truly dire outcomes to this plot, but as flimsy as it is, the film has a sly sense of humor that allows for a surprising degree of subversion. Their first date establishes the leads as essentially compatible on the grounds that they are equally unsocialized. For all his unforced sweetness, John couldn't flirt his way out of a paper bag and Mary spends the evening proposing a human society on the model of the beehive where the worker is preeminent and the useless male is stung to death—when John rather desperately tries to turn a compliment out of her assumed role as the queen, she retorts in horror, "I'm nothing of the kind! I'm a worker!" He pages glumly through advice from agony aunts and gives up on the autobiography of Casanova. She smiles for the first time over a gift of flowers that he didn't really send. It puts the audience in the nicely ambivalent position of wanting to root for the romance, but not while it's playing like the evil twin of Much Ado About Nothing. Literally, it turns into a heterosexual training film when Thompson with the assistance of a merrily on-the-make secretary (Googie Withers) inflicts a crash course in pick-up artistry on the sexually inexperienced John while Mary receives a much more consensual makeover from the elegant neighbor (Eve Turner) who inducted her into the mysteries of nylons and perfumes and watched like lesbian Pygmalion as Mary called up John to ask him out. And yet the very need for these sensually tongue-in-cheek lessons suggests that even when the results are a successful evening on the town and a real affair blossoming in place of a squeamish seduction, heterosexuality must be constructed just as artificially and perhaps as combustibly as celluloid. A clever bit of chemistry is used to indicate the stability of the romance. So long as the lovers are prevented from coming together by the impedimenta of misunderstanding and malice, the little dolls on which the scientists are accustomed to test their latest efforts—Kewpie dolls, after Cupid—keep going up in smoke. Only when all personal and professional obstacles have been overcome can a symbol of nitrocellulose love burn and not be consumed.
I discovered this film in a cache of British quota quickies on one of the junkier free channels of the Roku where everything looks as though it was hastily ripped from the stock of an independent video store while they were going out of business in 2009; after some rummaging I was able to locate it on the Internet Archive in not much worse condition. It wouldn't run an hour if it weren't for the credits and as a snapshot of social progress and social anxieties it fascinates me. Mary is initially derided by her male colleagues as "a serious-minded little frump," but when she glams up to wear her white coat like haute couture, Thompson uses the double standard to reassure the nervous men that it means "she doesn't look responsible enough to run a whole laboratory." If the audience isn't hissing him at that point, it isn't the actor's fault. In 1935, however fast, cheap, and disposable it may have been as entertainment and however sketchily if not skeletally it zips through its plot, The Love Test is non-negotiable on the points that Mary deserves her promotion, deserves to be loved, and Thompson is a villain for trying to sabotage her on both fronts; hence his disgrace while John gets the recognition of a hero, explicitly because his discovery of a process for non-flammable celluloid—fifteen years ahead of schedule for safety film—secures her position at the works. I was so worried that any romantic reconciliation would oblige her to give up her career and it is never suggested. The right man is the one who helps a woman succeed. Rudimentary as it is, this importance accorded to a female character feels like Powell even before Pressburger; it was scripted by Selwyn Jepson, whose career as a recruiting officer for SOE is all over the history of other people I read about and whose career as a novelist and screenwriter had almost not crossed my radar at all except insofar as he provided the source novel for Hitchcock's Stage Fright (1950). I may now have to check out his other work. Even the fact of the film as a quota quickie makes it interesting, because it's not a prestige picture about Marie Curie by the Kordas, it was coughed up on screen for couch change and assumes that the British public will agree with its attitude about women, i.e., they should get to have it all. Excuse me while I scream into this conical flask. Incidentally, The Love Test marks the youngest I have ever seen Bernard Miles; he is tragically cute in his glasses and sweater vests and forward-flopping hair and like nearly every other male character in this picture, he's a sexist twerp. This burn brought to you by my responsible backers at Patreon.
Actually, I had no particular expectations of this movie; I watched it because it was the earliest film I had run across by Michael Powell—one of seven he directed in the next-to-last year of his speedrun of an apprenticeship through the quota quickie mines of the Cinematograph Films Act 1927—and I recognized favorably several of the cast. The premise did not sound promising. In a laboratory full of research chemists all bent on the grail of non-flammable celluloid, the chief chemist has tendered his stress-induced resignation and recommended as his successor not the chest-beater with seniority already accepting congratulations from his cronies, but the proto-boffin barely raising her head from her researches as the temperature of office gossip rises around her, the ineluctably geeky but nevertheless female Mary Lee (Judy Gunn). Outraged at the prospect of being passed over for "a girl," cut-rate Iago Thompson (David Hutcheson) proposes to use the month to discredit her by distracting her from her work with a love affair, and because mild-mannered John Gregg (Louis Hayward) is the one man in the lab who defends and isn't threatened by her, he's cheated into being nominated for the part of the cad. A chart is drawn up to record his progress with a woman generally agreed to possess "the appeal of a Bunsen burner." From the title and the dreamy orchestral music over which the camera glided through the glassware of the lab, we are watching a romantic comedy.
I could and did envision some truly dire outcomes to this plot, but as flimsy as it is, the film has a sly sense of humor that allows for a surprising degree of subversion. Their first date establishes the leads as essentially compatible on the grounds that they are equally unsocialized. For all his unforced sweetness, John couldn't flirt his way out of a paper bag and Mary spends the evening proposing a human society on the model of the beehive where the worker is preeminent and the useless male is stung to death—when John rather desperately tries to turn a compliment out of her assumed role as the queen, she retorts in horror, "I'm nothing of the kind! I'm a worker!" He pages glumly through advice from agony aunts and gives up on the autobiography of Casanova. She smiles for the first time over a gift of flowers that he didn't really send. It puts the audience in the nicely ambivalent position of wanting to root for the romance, but not while it's playing like the evil twin of Much Ado About Nothing. Literally, it turns into a heterosexual training film when Thompson with the assistance of a merrily on-the-make secretary (Googie Withers) inflicts a crash course in pick-up artistry on the sexually inexperienced John while Mary receives a much more consensual makeover from the elegant neighbor (Eve Turner) who inducted her into the mysteries of nylons and perfumes and watched like lesbian Pygmalion as Mary called up John to ask him out. And yet the very need for these sensually tongue-in-cheek lessons suggests that even when the results are a successful evening on the town and a real affair blossoming in place of a squeamish seduction, heterosexuality must be constructed just as artificially and perhaps as combustibly as celluloid. A clever bit of chemistry is used to indicate the stability of the romance. So long as the lovers are prevented from coming together by the impedimenta of misunderstanding and malice, the little dolls on which the scientists are accustomed to test their latest efforts—Kewpie dolls, after Cupid—keep going up in smoke. Only when all personal and professional obstacles have been overcome can a symbol of nitrocellulose love burn and not be consumed.
I discovered this film in a cache of British quota quickies on one of the junkier free channels of the Roku where everything looks as though it was hastily ripped from the stock of an independent video store while they were going out of business in 2009; after some rummaging I was able to locate it on the Internet Archive in not much worse condition. It wouldn't run an hour if it weren't for the credits and as a snapshot of social progress and social anxieties it fascinates me. Mary is initially derided by her male colleagues as "a serious-minded little frump," but when she glams up to wear her white coat like haute couture, Thompson uses the double standard to reassure the nervous men that it means "she doesn't look responsible enough to run a whole laboratory." If the audience isn't hissing him at that point, it isn't the actor's fault. In 1935, however fast, cheap, and disposable it may have been as entertainment and however sketchily if not skeletally it zips through its plot, The Love Test is non-negotiable on the points that Mary deserves her promotion, deserves to be loved, and Thompson is a villain for trying to sabotage her on both fronts; hence his disgrace while John gets the recognition of a hero, explicitly because his discovery of a process for non-flammable celluloid—fifteen years ahead of schedule for safety film—secures her position at the works. I was so worried that any romantic reconciliation would oblige her to give up her career and it is never suggested. The right man is the one who helps a woman succeed. Rudimentary as it is, this importance accorded to a female character feels like Powell even before Pressburger; it was scripted by Selwyn Jepson, whose career as a recruiting officer for SOE is all over the history of other people I read about and whose career as a novelist and screenwriter had almost not crossed my radar at all except insofar as he provided the source novel for Hitchcock's Stage Fright (1950). I may now have to check out his other work. Even the fact of the film as a quota quickie makes it interesting, because it's not a prestige picture about Marie Curie by the Kordas, it was coughed up on screen for couch change and assumes that the British public will agree with its attitude about women, i.e., they should get to have it all. Excuse me while I scream into this conical flask. Incidentally, The Love Test marks the youngest I have ever seen Bernard Miles; he is tragically cute in his glasses and sweater vests and forward-flopping hair and like nearly every other male character in this picture, he's a sexist twerp. This burn brought to you by my responsible backers at Patreon.
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