Platinum Blonde (1931)
A pre-code romantic comedy with the deliberately ditzy Jean Harlow playing a rich girl and more classy Loretta Young playing the girl who lost her guy to Harlow. Both are sharp, convincing, and well cast. The leading man is a slightly affected, overacting, but charming Robert Williams, a type I associate with the early 1930s (a similar character was Lee Tracy who plays the movie agent in the 1932 "Dinner at Eight").
The director is none other than Frank Capra, who has yet to make his stellar films (including the 1934 breakout, "It Happened One Night"). But you can feel his tendencies at work, including a couple who love each other in an ordinary way but who have things come between them. This is part of the formula for what would be called screwball comedy, but "Platinum Blonde" isn't zany enough for that, and in fact it might be part of its problem historically. What makes it take off is Harlow and Williams being both willing to make their romance real, from joking to kissing to just hanging out in a normal way.
And the other thing that works is that it's just plain funny. Williams has an easy way of taking an off kilter world in stride which is great. And things do go wrong in the most charming ways sometimes. It isn't overly clever or original, but it's natural enough even old gags are legit. The central gag gets played out in the usual ways--a man in love with girls from two different social classes (a real Depression theme) has to figure out what to do. It would help that he notices he's actually still in love with the Loretta Young character.
A pre-code romantic comedy with the deliberately ditzy Jean Harlow playing a rich girl and more classy Loretta Young playing the girl who lost her guy to Harlow. Both are sharp, convincing, and well cast. The leading man is a slightly affected, overacting, but charming Robert Williams, a type I associate with the early 1930s (a similar character was Lee Tracy who plays the movie agent in the 1932 "Dinner at Eight").
The director is none other than Frank Capra, who has yet to make his stellar films (including the 1934 breakout, "It Happened One Night"). But you can feel his tendencies at work, including a couple who love each other in an ordinary way but who have things come between them. This is part of the formula for what would be called screwball comedy, but "Platinum Blonde" isn't zany enough for that, and in fact it might be part of its problem historically. What makes it take off is Harlow and Williams being both willing to make their romance real, from joking to kissing to just hanging out in a normal way.
And the other thing that works is that it's just plain funny. Williams has an easy way of taking an off kilter world in stride which is great. And things do go wrong in the most charming ways sometimes. It isn't overly clever or original, but it's natural enough even old gags are legit. The central gag gets played out in the usual ways--a man in love with girls from two different social classes (a real Depression theme) has to figure out what to do. It would help that he notices he's actually still in love with the Loretta Young character.