Film review: The Cowboy and the Lady (1938)

Another one that's leaving the Criterion Channel at the end of the month.  It was (misleadingly) billed as a Western take on It Happened One Night (one of my fave movies) but turned out to be much milder on the comedy and dialing up the romance.  Gary Cooper, playing a rodeo cowboy called Stretch (and looking it - very skinny and looking twice as tall as everyone else) plays it a bit buffoonish at first (very monosyllabic and aw shucks), while Merle Oberon (another in a line of English actors in the 30s movies who are supposed to be Americans but make no attempt to disguise their plummy English accents) is the rich daughter of a presidential hopeful who is supposed to be staying out of trouble out of the spotlight down in Palm Beach.  She persuades her two maids to take her out on a triple date to meet cowboys and tries their numbered system to hook a man, number 3 of which is tell him a sob story.  So Stretch thinks the girl he's fallen for (and who has fallen for him) is actually the sole breadwinner supporting her deadbeat father and four young sisters, when in fact she's the daughter of the owner of the fancy house he thinks she's a servant in.  There's a romantic boat trip from Palm Beach to Galveston and a ship-board wedding, and Oberon gets to show she can do slapstick trying to clean out Stretch's tent in Galveston and getting wrapped up in the fly-paper.  But then she gets called back to Palm Beach, Stretch asks her to meet him at his home in Montana, and her deception starts to break down.  Cooper's best moments are up at the ranch in Montana, teasing "Ma Hawkins" (who doesn't appear to be his actual mother but is clearly a surrogate) by perpetually untying her apron strings when she's not looking, and getting everyone to go along with his play acting in his as-yet-unbuilt house. 

The ones that do most of the comedy heavy-lifting, however, are Stretch's cowboy pals (including Walter Brennan), the two maids (most notably Patsy Kelly) and Oberon's kindly uncle Hannibal (Harry Davenport), who is a Bad Influence because he thinks his go-getter brother keeps her cooped up too much.  A bit slow in places, but a pleasant diversion.  First Merle Oberon film I've ever seen and it prompted me to look up her life story.  Now THAT should be a film - and in fact, was going to be, I think.