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Listen, my dying swan, this is no time to stop faking
Nothing Sacred (1937) may be the most cynical screwball comedy I have ever seen in my life. It is a delight.
For the record, we're talking A-picture. The film was directed by William Wellman and written by Ben Hecht until he fell out with producer David O. Selznick over not casting John Barrymore and the script was turned over to the divers hands of Dorothy Parker, Budd Schulberg, Ring Lardner Jr., George S. Kaufman, and other people it is actually not terrible to have to call in as last-minute script doctors; it stars Carole Lombard and Fredric March and I have my fingers crossed that the HFA has a decent print, because it was the first Technicolor film to incorporate effects like montage and rear projection and its location footage of New York City is top-notch. The score is by Oscar Levant and Raymond Scott, if you can believe it. And its romantic heroes are a small-town girl who scams her misdiagnosis of terminal illness into a free trip to the big city and the newspaperman who's more than cheerful to make her tragedy his meal ticket and the proof-of-love scene involves them trying to knock one another's blocks off and the happy ending finds him disparaging the attention span of her public and her defending the honor of her imposture and the tippling doctor who got the plot into this fix in the first place waking up still drunk, obviously having forgotten that they all fled incognito to the tropics, and bawling out the porthole of the steamer, "Run for your life! The hotel's flooded!" If you're looking for a moral, you've come to the wrong movie. The credits are decorated with caricatures of cast and crew alike. New York City is introduced in panorama as the "Skyscraper Champion of the World . . . where the Slickers and the Know-It-Alls peddle gold bricks to each other . . . and where Truth, crushed to earth, rises again more phony than a glass eye," but the fine rural citizens of Warsaw, Vermont wouldn't give George Washington any competition for that cherry tree. March's Wally Cook is so overjoyed to learn that his beloved isn't dying of radium poisoning after all that when Lombard's Hazel Flagg starts to pitch him an apology, he breezily promises to cheat on her for the next fifty years to make up for it. If it weren't for the release date, I would be tempted to wonder if this movie were some kind of late-breaking pre-Code. The showgirl who gives the camera the finger is just lagniappe.
I knew about Lombard and comedy: she was one of the luminaries of the screwball era and Nothing Sacred is her sole Technicolor film, for which alone it would be valuable. I had no idea about Fredric March. He did very well as one-third of a three-way with Gary Cooper and Miriam Hopkins in Lubitsch's Design for Living (1933), but Noël Coward is a different skill set than screwball. He's marvelous as a professional trickster who's a private sap, a cynic who falls in love without slush and switches gears seamlessly from grieving to spin: "Because I love you. Because I'm going to marry you. And I don't want to spend my honeymoon hanging around Sing Sing, blowing kisses to you in the exercise yard!" That's the pre-Code spirit: no guilt and no comeuppance. Wally doesn't for a second feel bad about exploiting a supposedly dying girl in order to boost the circulation of the Morning Star and get himself out of the doghouse with his tetchy editor, he just starts to mind the dying part once he's fallen in love with her. Hazel feels bad about her fakery only insofar as she worries it might blow up her romance; otherwise the real downside is the maudlin, preemptive, performative grief that the city schmaltzes all over "the bravest kid who ever lived" or, as she's immortalized by a visiting poet in a prime piece of fish-wrap, "Oh Laughing Girl Upon the Brink of Death / Oh Singing Heart Before the Door of Doom . . ." The city fathers don't miss a photo op presenting her with the key. Nightclub emcees dedicate floor shows to her frail, touching heroism. Delicatessens boast with their window displays that "Miss Hazel Flagg Lunched Here To-Day" (the camera pulls back to chase this last with the telling advertisement "All Kinds of Cheese and Bologna Our Specialty"). Wally's editor is so blithely ambulance-chasing that the revelation of Hazel's no longer impending demise from radiation plunges him into a depression from which he can be revived only by the report that she might have come down with galloping pneumonia instead. Even Howard Hawks' His Girl Friday (1940), otherwise a high-water mark for low morals in journalism, takes a moment of silence for the death of an innocent incurred in the callous pursuit of a good story. There's no such pause in Nothing Sacred. To be fair, in Nothing Sacred nobody dies, but when a main character lies to the rest of the cast for two acts out of three, the audience expects at least a beat of betrayal, recrimination, reconciliation. Instead it throws us a slapstick fistfight staged for the express purpose of getting Hazel exhausted and sweaty and panting enough to pass for sick in bed with pneumonia. (In another deft tweak of the Code, the dialogue leads the audience to wonder for a dizzy moment whether Wally is just going to sex her into the necessary state of pseudo-fever—of course he can't with Joseph Breen looking over his shoulder, but the image lingers.) The plot rackets from deception to discovery and on to the next deception. Being a romantic comedy insures it against too much of a downer ending, but it absolutely resists cheap or even expensive sentiment along the way. And it loves its lovers, which only heightens the effect. There is not a hint of tsk-tsking from the narrative, the kind of indulgent schadenfreude that would make it morally acceptable to enjoy the antics of the lead couple because we all know they are wrong; it doesn't present them as terrible people who deserve one another à la Twentieth Century (1934) or, again, His Girl Friday. Wally and Hazel are clever, silly, antiheroic, attractive, and really in love. That the film so consistently endorses them illustrates the virtue of screwball as romance: love in this genre can be breathtakingly amoral, but it's rarely mean-spirited. It's no disgrace to go head over heels for it—even literally. Settle for being a sucker for everything you read, though, and pal, you're on your own.
I have not read the source short story, published in Cosmopolitan in 1937, so I can't say whether James H. Street's "Letter to the Editor" is more or less satirical than its movie, more or less romantic, or even whether it follows the same arc. Certainly it wouldn't have Lombard's ability to look unbelievably beautiful and utterly goofy in the same gesture or the thousand-yard deadpan with which March wears a paper cup from the water bubbler like a feather in his fedora, grimly pounding out obituaries while feeling like one himself. I confess myself skeptical that any of its dialogue could be snappier than Hecht, Parker et al. ("For good, clean fun, there's nothing like a wake."–"Oh, please, let's not talk shop"). I would not be surprised if the film invented the Viennese radiation specialist and his heel-clicking coterie, not to mention the New England town so mean that when Wally walks by a picket-fenced yard, a toddler darts out and chomps him on the leg, and I don't see how a short story could reproduce the sardonic effect of a camera that shoots an emotionally tremulous moment with a tree limb blocking both characters' faces or circles a shipping crate while a love scene is going on inside. Except for a few moments of racial humor, which are at least mildly mitigated by the character played by Troy Brown being just as unashamedly out for himself as anyone else in the story, for better or worse I don't think the script has dated at all. But it is also caustically topical, especially in its indictment of the public's "trick tears and phony lamentations" that don't in any way translate to altering conditions at the Paragon Watch Factory so that girls before and after Hazel won't die of radium poisoning for real. There are some sharp, stealthy bones beneath the bright skin of this film. Six months after the release of Nothing Sacred, five of the infamous "Radium Girls" would finally win their decade-long suit against the Chicago watch-dial factory that had fatally and knowingly poisoned them. The article in which Wally first reads about Hazel includes mention of two previous deaths. Before she learned her diagnosis was a mistake, she dreamed wistfully of traveling on her factory bonus of "that two hundred dollars you get for dying in Warsaw." What can you do with a world like that, except take it for all you can get, love included? This sob story brought to you by my cynical backers at Patreon.
For the record, we're talking A-picture. The film was directed by William Wellman and written by Ben Hecht until he fell out with producer David O. Selznick over not casting John Barrymore and the script was turned over to the divers hands of Dorothy Parker, Budd Schulberg, Ring Lardner Jr., George S. Kaufman, and other people it is actually not terrible to have to call in as last-minute script doctors; it stars Carole Lombard and Fredric March and I have my fingers crossed that the HFA has a decent print, because it was the first Technicolor film to incorporate effects like montage and rear projection and its location footage of New York City is top-notch. The score is by Oscar Levant and Raymond Scott, if you can believe it. And its romantic heroes are a small-town girl who scams her misdiagnosis of terminal illness into a free trip to the big city and the newspaperman who's more than cheerful to make her tragedy his meal ticket and the proof-of-love scene involves them trying to knock one another's blocks off and the happy ending finds him disparaging the attention span of her public and her defending the honor of her imposture and the tippling doctor who got the plot into this fix in the first place waking up still drunk, obviously having forgotten that they all fled incognito to the tropics, and bawling out the porthole of the steamer, "Run for your life! The hotel's flooded!" If you're looking for a moral, you've come to the wrong movie. The credits are decorated with caricatures of cast and crew alike. New York City is introduced in panorama as the "Skyscraper Champion of the World . . . where the Slickers and the Know-It-Alls peddle gold bricks to each other . . . and where Truth, crushed to earth, rises again more phony than a glass eye," but the fine rural citizens of Warsaw, Vermont wouldn't give George Washington any competition for that cherry tree. March's Wally Cook is so overjoyed to learn that his beloved isn't dying of radium poisoning after all that when Lombard's Hazel Flagg starts to pitch him an apology, he breezily promises to cheat on her for the next fifty years to make up for it. If it weren't for the release date, I would be tempted to wonder if this movie were some kind of late-breaking pre-Code. The showgirl who gives the camera the finger is just lagniappe.
I knew about Lombard and comedy: she was one of the luminaries of the screwball era and Nothing Sacred is her sole Technicolor film, for which alone it would be valuable. I had no idea about Fredric March. He did very well as one-third of a three-way with Gary Cooper and Miriam Hopkins in Lubitsch's Design for Living (1933), but Noël Coward is a different skill set than screwball. He's marvelous as a professional trickster who's a private sap, a cynic who falls in love without slush and switches gears seamlessly from grieving to spin: "Because I love you. Because I'm going to marry you. And I don't want to spend my honeymoon hanging around Sing Sing, blowing kisses to you in the exercise yard!" That's the pre-Code spirit: no guilt and no comeuppance. Wally doesn't for a second feel bad about exploiting a supposedly dying girl in order to boost the circulation of the Morning Star and get himself out of the doghouse with his tetchy editor, he just starts to mind the dying part once he's fallen in love with her. Hazel feels bad about her fakery only insofar as she worries it might blow up her romance; otherwise the real downside is the maudlin, preemptive, performative grief that the city schmaltzes all over "the bravest kid who ever lived" or, as she's immortalized by a visiting poet in a prime piece of fish-wrap, "Oh Laughing Girl Upon the Brink of Death / Oh Singing Heart Before the Door of Doom . . ." The city fathers don't miss a photo op presenting her with the key. Nightclub emcees dedicate floor shows to her frail, touching heroism. Delicatessens boast with their window displays that "Miss Hazel Flagg Lunched Here To-Day" (the camera pulls back to chase this last with the telling advertisement "All Kinds of Cheese and Bologna Our Specialty"). Wally's editor is so blithely ambulance-chasing that the revelation of Hazel's no longer impending demise from radiation plunges him into a depression from which he can be revived only by the report that she might have come down with galloping pneumonia instead. Even Howard Hawks' His Girl Friday (1940), otherwise a high-water mark for low morals in journalism, takes a moment of silence for the death of an innocent incurred in the callous pursuit of a good story. There's no such pause in Nothing Sacred. To be fair, in Nothing Sacred nobody dies, but when a main character lies to the rest of the cast for two acts out of three, the audience expects at least a beat of betrayal, recrimination, reconciliation. Instead it throws us a slapstick fistfight staged for the express purpose of getting Hazel exhausted and sweaty and panting enough to pass for sick in bed with pneumonia. (In another deft tweak of the Code, the dialogue leads the audience to wonder for a dizzy moment whether Wally is just going to sex her into the necessary state of pseudo-fever—of course he can't with Joseph Breen looking over his shoulder, but the image lingers.) The plot rackets from deception to discovery and on to the next deception. Being a romantic comedy insures it against too much of a downer ending, but it absolutely resists cheap or even expensive sentiment along the way. And it loves its lovers, which only heightens the effect. There is not a hint of tsk-tsking from the narrative, the kind of indulgent schadenfreude that would make it morally acceptable to enjoy the antics of the lead couple because we all know they are wrong; it doesn't present them as terrible people who deserve one another à la Twentieth Century (1934) or, again, His Girl Friday. Wally and Hazel are clever, silly, antiheroic, attractive, and really in love. That the film so consistently endorses them illustrates the virtue of screwball as romance: love in this genre can be breathtakingly amoral, but it's rarely mean-spirited. It's no disgrace to go head over heels for it—even literally. Settle for being a sucker for everything you read, though, and pal, you're on your own.
I have not read the source short story, published in Cosmopolitan in 1937, so I can't say whether James H. Street's "Letter to the Editor" is more or less satirical than its movie, more or less romantic, or even whether it follows the same arc. Certainly it wouldn't have Lombard's ability to look unbelievably beautiful and utterly goofy in the same gesture or the thousand-yard deadpan with which March wears a paper cup from the water bubbler like a feather in his fedora, grimly pounding out obituaries while feeling like one himself. I confess myself skeptical that any of its dialogue could be snappier than Hecht, Parker et al. ("For good, clean fun, there's nothing like a wake."–"Oh, please, let's not talk shop"). I would not be surprised if the film invented the Viennese radiation specialist and his heel-clicking coterie, not to mention the New England town so mean that when Wally walks by a picket-fenced yard, a toddler darts out and chomps him on the leg, and I don't see how a short story could reproduce the sardonic effect of a camera that shoots an emotionally tremulous moment with a tree limb blocking both characters' faces or circles a shipping crate while a love scene is going on inside. Except for a few moments of racial humor, which are at least mildly mitigated by the character played by Troy Brown being just as unashamedly out for himself as anyone else in the story, for better or worse I don't think the script has dated at all. But it is also caustically topical, especially in its indictment of the public's "trick tears and phony lamentations" that don't in any way translate to altering conditions at the Paragon Watch Factory so that girls before and after Hazel won't die of radium poisoning for real. There are some sharp, stealthy bones beneath the bright skin of this film. Six months after the release of Nothing Sacred, five of the infamous "Radium Girls" would finally win their decade-long suit against the Chicago watch-dial factory that had fatally and knowingly poisoned them. The article in which Wally first reads about Hazel includes mention of two previous deaths. Before she learned her diagnosis was a mistake, she dreamed wistfully of traveling on her factory bonus of "that two hundred dollars you get for dying in Warsaw." What can you do with a world like that, except take it for all you can get, love included? This sob story brought to you by my cynical backers at Patreon.
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Enjoy!
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My inner Kestrell says "Hey!" in an offended tone :-)
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I suppose a phony glass eye would logically be a real one. Or I guess made out of plastic.
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He was off my radar for years. I would have seen him first in Inherit the Wind (1960), but in seventh or eighth grade I didn't even know who Spencer Tracy was—I recognized Gene Kelly and that was it—and I thought he was excellent in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) at a point in time when his name meant something to me, but it told me nothing about his ability to slow-burn over a typewriter or get his clock cleaned by Carole Lombard. I am actively interested in him now.
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I should probably see that. For some reason I have seen Spencer Tracy's version, but not Fredric March's. I think the makeup always put me off.
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This is so cheering! The cheese-and-bologna part made me laugh.
I didn't realize that the notion of feting a brave, dying young person, à la make-a-wish foundation, only aimed slightly older, was a thing in the past! Somehow I thought ghoulish sentimentality was a product of the second half of the twentieth century... but I shouldn't have, thinking of Emmeline Grangerford (had to look up her name just now) from Huckleberry Finn.
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I am pretty sure it is the least depressing movie for its degree of cynicism I have ever seen.
Somehow I thought ghoulish sentimentality was a product of the second half of the twentieth century... but I shouldn't have, thinking of Emmeline Grangerford (had to look up her name just now) from Huckleberry Finn.
I'd forgotten about Emmeline Grangerford!
I do think there's something modern about Hazel's story, if only in the speed of the media blitz and the rolling news cycle that follows her obsessively until it doesn't. The only difference nowadays would be that it would happen even faster.
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It feels like the kind of film there is a non-zero chance of the Film Forum showing! I hope you get a chance soon.