Film review: Platinum Blonde (1931)

This film, which is one of Frank Capra's earlier talkies, made me happy until I looked up the main male actor, Robert Williams, because he was so good that I immediately wanted to see more of him.  Turns out he died of a burst appendix shortly after the film was released.  It was a huge hit, and after toiling in obscurity for a decade he was on the fast track to stardom (watch this film and you will see why) and then, bam.  It's like knowing the little boy in Mary Poppins died very young (hey, I know that, so you had to, too).  Anyway, this is one of the innumerable newspaper-based comedies of the 30s and 40s, and Williams is Stew Smith, star reporter, who is sent to find out if the male heir of the Schuyler family is being blackmailed by some chorus girl to whom he sent unwise mash notes.  He very quickly establishes that they have, and unlike the (rival) Tribune's reporter Bingy Baker (a very cartoonish figure, appropriately played by Walter Catlett), he turns down the $50 bribe he is offered by the family lawyer 

(with whom he maintains a humorous feud - culminating in a biff on the nose - throughout the film) and quickly establishes not just that this is happening, but how much they're paying the blackmailer to destroy the letters.  The Schuyler daughter, notorious beauty Anne (played, uncharacteristically, by Jean Harlow) tries to sweet talk him, and thinks she has succeeded, until she hears him dictate the story from the phone she has directed him to.  He gets shown the door, but at least gives them a nickel for the use of the phone.  However, Anne's blue-or-possibly-violet eyes have, in fact, won Stew over, 

and he contrives to go over to the mansion the next day under the pretext of returning a volume of Conrad (his favorite author) that he had been reading while being kept waiting (and while Bingy was stuffing his pockets with cigars), 

and wins Anne over by returning the letters, which he has swiped while interviewing the never-seen chorus girl.  Thereafter begins a whirlwind romance that breaks the heart of Stew's newspaper colleague "Gallagher" (the much prettier-than-Harlow Loretta Young) 

whom he had always thought of as simply a "pal" (and never calls by her first name, which leads to confusion with Anne later), leading to a secret marriage (that Bingy somehow gets word of and breaks in the Tribune).  Stew's boss is alternately mad that he got scooped about his own reporter, and amused by Stew's belief that he can maintain his previous lifestyle and be known as anything other than "Anne Schuyler's husband" - he signs "I'm only a bird in a gilded cage" to hammer home the point.  And in fact, Anne does believe that she can change Stew, and proceeds to do so, starting by having him move into the family mansion and start wearing sock suspenders.  

But (of course) the high life starts to chafe on Stew, and while Anne still seems fun, her family is a drag, and the mansion seems haunted.  Meanwhile Stew has been struggling to write a play for the whole duration of the movie, only getting so far as the location it is to be set (which moves around the world and across the centuries), and only really gets started when, having refused to go out to yet another fancy engagement, but at a loose end, 

he invites Gallagher over to the mansion and she brings along the entire newsroom.  She encourages him to "write what he knows," 

and we instantly get meta, as he writes the story of his relationship, gets stuck for act endings, only to have unfolding events (Anne and family return to find the party) solve these story problems for him.

Fairly standard fare for this era, but with some nice moments (the butler, Smythe, is a good comic foil) to go along with the teeth-gritting parody of an Indian Chief performed by Bingy (that would not have caused even an eyelid to flicker on British TV well up into the late 20th century).  But Robert Williams is the story: he's a natural.  His eyes are remarkable (they kept making me think of Bill Murray) and his delivery is remarkably natural for this era.  (Christopher Plummer described him as applying The Method to comedic acting decades before Brando and Clift supposedly introduced it into the movies.)  Truly a lost giant.  (Kind of odd that he gets more-or-less third billing, but perhaps even odder that Loretta Young gets first billing, when we think of the title as effectively synonymous with Harlow.  I find Harlow's reputation of a sexpot, like that of Mae West, mystifying.  She looks decidedly plain (certainly in contrast with Young), and this role does nothing for her, adept as she is at playing characters who have clawed out of the gutter.  I think that the "Platinum" is meant to be a pun, referring to the character's wealth, because otherwise she doesn't merit having the movie named after her.)