Film review: More Than A Secretary (1936)

Simon is officially done with both picking out movies and writing up reviews of them so anyone reading this blog is going to have to put up with my choices and my opinions for the forseeable future.

We are subscribed to The Criterion Channel which is a mixed blessing: it is not overly expensive and they have movies we enjoy watching but navigating through the site is extremely frustrating and recently, all the movies run at 1/4 speed--which means that after we select a movie we have to then switch to our Roku account to watch the movie on that site--which is even MORE annoying to navigate.  So while Simon claimed to be working on his book in his office, I was at home trying to find a decent movie to watch. I found a Criterion collection called "working relationships"--a vague description if ever there was one--but I gathered from the few titles I was familiar with that they were screwball comedies that criticize notions of 'modern' love. Adam's Rib and His Gal Friday were in the collection.  But this movie, More Than A Secretary, was new to me and since it stars Jean Arthur I was all in.

The movie was made in 1936 and, aside from comments about "men," it is decidedly unpolitical.  It begins with the camera zooming in through a tall office building window. As we close in we can hear the steady tap tapping of dozens of mechanical typewriters and we can see two rooms filled with young women steadfastly typing away as a teacher in each room dictates various sentences or rhyming words to give them the chance to practice. Here is Ruth Donnelly, who plays one of the teachers Helen Davis, the best friend of the female lead: she's smart, honest, funny, loyal and dearly cares for her silly best friend, Carol Baldwin, who is played by Jean Arthur.  And, according to the Rules of the Side Kick, she's never going to get a man. 

Both Carol and Helen are exasperated with their worst student, Maize, who can't type to save her life and doesn't even care. She doesn't want to be a secretary, she wants to be the wife (or, failing that, the mistress) of a rich businessman. Maize has mastered being the woman the businessman wants and tells her teachers that they are saps for trying to be anything other than an appendage on a rich businessman.  To underscore her point, she's offered a job right in the middle of them telling her she's failed out of their typing program.  Looking smug, Maize sails out of the room with her eye on the prize.   

Meanwhile, another businessman, Fred Gilbert played by George Brent, who is the managing editor of Body and Brain magazine, has hired (and fired) many secretaries from this school and calls to complain to Carol to tell her that the secretaries feckless and stupid and he demands a secretary who can actually do the job. Carol is of two minds--given what she has seen with Maize, she knows only too well that most of her students are useless but she's also determined to find out what exactly he wants. She arrives to a bewildering scene: an entire office of employees who alternate from working demonically on a magazine and doing calesthenics for 10 minutes every hour. Their mandated lunches, bran muffins and butter milk, are provided free. Here is Mr. Gilbert's right hand man and exercise guru, Ernest played by Lionel Stander, shouting out stretch moves.  

Carol is both astonished and quickly finds herself (a) forced to exercise and (b) strong armed into becoming Mr. Gilbert's new personal secretary.

But she is also genuinely attracted to Mr. Gilbert: he is completely serious about running the office like a well designed machine.  To Helen's amazement (and mine, too), Carol takes the job which requires longer hours, less control over her career, and less pay.  Why?  Because she's smitten.  Why?  I'm not sure.  George Brent the actor is good looking enough, but the character of Mr. Gilbert is really hard to take: he's prudish (won't tolerate any "cheesecake" images of women in his magazine depite Carol telling him that "sex and celebrity sells"), he forces other people to eat intolerable food (vegetarian meat substitutes that are badly done), and he demands perfect compliance with his unending exercise regimes at work. He is also overly interested in The Liver, the subject of every editorial article he writes.

That is, until he catches a cold (which he feels he must lie about because sickness is weakness in his mind), and stays home so Carol has to put out the next Body and Brain issue.  She decides to make a "few changes" and adds plenty of sex appeal and it works: the new issue sells out in minutes and rather than be grateful, Mr. Gilbert is furious and fires her. Annoyingly, Carol is devastated. Then, in true "will they, won't they" comedy/romance style, he gives her a groveling apology, she goes back to the magazine, he promotes her to associate editor and he then hires....MAIZE to replace Carol as his personal secretary.  (Why is Maize unemployed?  Because the guy who hired her at the start of the movie has a wife who is "coming back from Europe" and she knows what he's really up to when he's "working.")  

Well, Maize hasn't changed but Mr. Gilbert sure has: if he was softening under the influence of Carol, he melts into jelly in the hands of Maize and they go off on wild benders until 4 in the morning every night for weeks.  Needless to say the magazine suffers, Carol gets angry, quits, and she and Helen buy a car, a camper/trailer and head out to Yosemite with the plan of never coming back. (At this point Simon asked if this was a Lavender Romance movie?  I don't think so but what do I know....)

Just seconds later Mr. Gilbert comes to his senses and fires Maize only to find Carol is long gone.  So what's Mr. Gilbert going to do to get her back?  The only thing he can do: put out the next issue of Body and Brain with editorials and ads that are thinly veiled messages to Carol, each one telling her how much he (thinks he) loves her. Will they work?  Well, it is a comedy romance...

Despite Jean Arthur doing her best, this movie doesn't really fire on all cylinders--which is a shame because the side characters are really funny, particularly exercise guru Ernest, who is happy to stretch anyone into ridiculous contortions even when they scream in pain. "It'll hurt a lot more tomorrow!", he tells them. But the relationship between Carol and Mr. Gilbert (I don't think she ever calls him by his first name) just isn't sexy, or cute, or remotely plausible.  I sure wouldn't give up teaching at a school I owned to be with a guy who thinks only about liver health and I can't believe anyone would. (Though having said that, I do know someone who really does believe that the solution to most health problems is liver health so, maybe there really are people who would fall head over heels for such a guy.)