PLATINUM BLONDE (1931)

The Front Page, the 1928 play by the great writing partnership of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, provided the basis for two two films of that same title, the first in the early 1930s with Adolphe Menjou and Pat O'Brien as the lovably cutthroat journalist heroes and the second in the 1970s, a late Billy Wilder project starring Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon in the same roles. Newly christened, the original play took a new form in 1940 in one of the best movies ever made, just about the only film that I can imagine being selected as an all-time favorite by both Leonard Maltin and Quentin Tarantino. That film is, of course, His Girl Friday, directed by Howard Hawks and with Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant now playing the heroes. Considering the unlikelihood of my saying anything new about that film, I thought I'd instead talk about another, not undeservedly lesser-known film, but one which just might be another Front Page spin-off, at least if you choose to believe its director.
Platinum Blonde (1931) came at a fairly early point in Frank Capra's career, as he was still proving himself Columbia's star director and mogul Harry Cohn's best and brightest hope for elevating the studio from its Poverty Row origins to a place up among the town's major players. The writing credits are up to Hollywood's typically convoluted standard, separately citing "story by," "adaptation," and "dialogue." The last is assigned to Robert Riskin, who wrote the original draft and would go on to serve as Capra's main writing collaborator for most of the 1930s, arguably doing as much as Capra to set the unique Capra stamp. According to Joseph McBride's Capra biography The Catastrophe of Success, when the director later spoke about Platinum Blonde, he underplayed its role as the start of a creative partnership, rather claiming to have nicked the story from the Hecht-MacArthur classic.

It's a convincing enough claim at first glance, considering the shared focus on the boozy, smoke-filled world of city newsrooms and the lovably cynical, scrappy hacks who fill them. Robert Williams' Stew Smith isn't too far removed from Walter Burns, Cary Grant's conniving editor in His Girl Friday. By the same measure, Stew's slow-burning romance with his colleague and best pal Gallagher (Loretta Young) seems like a less tempestuous version of the relationship in His Girl Friday between Grant's character and Rosalind Russell's Hildy Johnson, his former wife and subordinate at the paper.
If there's a problem with Capra's reminiscences, it's that the love-hate male-female relationship of His Girl Friday was a new addition, incorporated according to legend after Howard Hawks noticed how well it worked when his "continuity girl" read one of the two primary, both originally male roles, converting platonic male bonding and feuding into sexual warfare. Capra could not very well have stolen an element from The Front Page that had not yet been introduced to it. If anything, he was anticipating His Girl Friday, if only in the rather simple peg on which he hangs his tale. What's distinctive about Platinum Blonde is less it's own qualities, though those are present, than how it looks ahead to careers and films yet to come, and in one case to an actor's promise which was never fulfilled.
As accurately as the title, for instance, might describe lead Jean Harlow's radiantly bleached mane, it otherwise conveys little about what the movie is actually like. Like Capra, Harlow was in the process of becoming a star when she appeared in the film, and she was able to seize on the project for advancing her image, which the title just about sums up perfectly. What's less than perfectly suited to Harlow is the role itself, which has her playing a genteel, blue-blood Park Avenue princess whose unsuitability as a match for the reporter hero is meant to provide the story's engine. It's hard to imagine why anyone at Columbia thought this character would make for a neat fit with Harlow, whose appeal derived from her combination of an urban, working-class manner which must have rung bells of recognition in much of her Depression-era audience, and a sense of voluptuous sexuality which rang bells of a very different kind. Having appeared the year before as the moll to James Cagney's strutting bantam of a mobster in The Public Enemy, she does just about as well as anyone could have expected or demanded, but the performance is more a tamped-down version of her usual persona than a credible Gotham heiress. The odd thing is that the film does contain a potentially better role for Harlow, in a character who's mentioned but never seen. Probably a vestigial remnant of an earlier draft of the script, this figure is the showgirl whose short-lived marriage to Harlow's playboy, Brilliantine-haired brother has been annulled before the film begins. It's to investigate the prospect of scandal among New York's upper-crust that Stew Smith shows up at the family's door in the beginning, but this part of the plot is soon forgotten. It's easy to imagine a different comedy in which Harlow played the discarded showgirl and Williams her savior, and tempting to wonder if Capra, Harlow, or anyone else on the production ever wondered if they were not making the wrong film.

Where Harlow's performance does work is in the scenes where Capra is able to achieve an unforced, natural feeling to her scenes with Robert Williams. Even if the material in the script isn't up to the mark which Capra would start consistently hitting within just a few films, the handling of the camera and cast is always impressive, particularly in mind of how early this movie comes in Hollywood's transition to sound. I'm thinking in particular of some lovely individual shots, one of Harlow and William's first kiss, in a gazebo in her family estate's garden, which have the same gauzy, lusciously romantic tone which Capra would later allow to run wild in the underrated masterpiece The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933). Considering the ramshackle quality of the script, the extent to which Capra was able to almost pull off the whole daft enterprise must have been a mark in his favor with Columbia's bosses.
As thin as the script is, there's a certain interest in seeing both Capra and the Hollywood screwball comedy taking some early, tentative steps in Platinum Blonde toward the more accomplished movies that would arrive later in the decade. Capra's favorite, often ambivalently fascination with relations between the rich and the poor, expressed both in populist celebration of the "common people" and an attraction toward power and privilege, is dealt with more straightforwardly here, as Stew Smith enters into the world of the New York elite and then quickly decides that they are not for him. Harlow pulling Williams into the upper class is not unlike Carole Lombard selecting William Powell in My Man Godfrey (1936), except that Platinum Blonde imagines its upper-class characters with rather less verve, restricting the fun to be had in the movie to its working-class journalists. Compounding the weakness of the rich-poor theme, the casting of Loretta Young as Stew Smith's "Girl Friday" and supposedly more proletarian alternative to his platinum blonde wife jars with the fact that Harlow seems more genuinely working-class.
Actually, the Stew Smith-Gallagher subplot is less reminiscent, even preemptively, of His Girl Friday than of another 1940 movie adapted from a Broadway play, one not really in the screwball tradition though made with much of its energy, The Philadelphia Story. I'm thinking in particular of the subplot involving the relationship between James Stewart's reporter and his photographer, played by Ruth Hussey, which remains platonic long enough for Stewart's dalliance with Katherine Hepburn's heiress and becomes romantic in time for Stewart's rejection by Hepburn, which frees her up for the more socially acceptable option of her former husband, C.K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant).

The 1930s comedies more truly deserving the screwball appellation were less circumspect about violating America's class boundaries on-screen, as Capra and Robert Riskin would do in It Happened One Night. Perhaps it couldn't be said to amount to serious social commentary; actually, it almost certainly did not have much to do with the real world, but the imaginative social transgressions made by those films were one source of their vitality and power. Another was their ability to allow men and women to be equally funny on screen, even while in love with each other, which is surprisingly rare in American comedy. Platinum Blonde makes some tentative moves in that direction by insisting that Gallagher is "just one of the boys," but still reserves for the boys the ability to actually be funny.
The one promise made by Platinum Blonde which went unfulfilled is that of Robert Williams' career. A known Broadway performer, Williams received his first big role in this film, and what he does with it is easily the most impressive thing onscreen. Within minutes of his brash and confident performance, I was wondering why I'd never before heard of Robert Williams before or noticed his other work playing on TCM. As some cursory research revealed, Williams' career, and life, came to an abrupt end after Platinum Blonde. Within four days of the movie's release, the actor had suffered an attack of appendicitis and died, only thirty three years old. we're lucky to have this one performance of his, and if initially the film was conceived and received, down to its title, as one long advertisement for Jean Harlow, today it seems more valuable as a vehicle for that performance. Taken as a whole, Platinum Blonde might not be such a treasure, but the world of film might well have been all the poorer if it had never been made.