Grand Slam

One of the funniest comedy shorts I've seen is Al St. John's "Bridge Wives". It's ridiculous and over the top as it shows a husband losing his mind because his wife has been playing a marathon bridge game for weeks...only for it to end in a tie! Well, while "Grand Slam" isn't quite as memorable, it's quite similar and is apparently evidence that bridge was a VERY popular game back in the 1930s. It would help to understand the movie better if you understand Bridge, though you still can enjoy it regardless.

Peter Stanislavsky (Paul Lukas) is apparently very good at playing bridge, though he obviously doesn't seem to enjoy the game nor the drama that often accompanies it. Later, he ends up being pushed into playing a game and doesn't realize that one of the people he's playing against is considered the world's greatest Bridge player. Well, after defeating this champion handily, suddenly Peter is famous...and his life certainly changes for the worse. Ultimately, it even ruins his marriage to Marcia (Loretta Young).

While I'd never say it's a laugh out loud film like "Bridge Wives", it is clever and enjoyable...and I nearly gave it an 8. Unusual and well made for a B-movie.

This film breeches the fine line between satire and silliness. While a bridge system that has no rules may promote marital harmony, it certainly can't promote winning bridge, so the satire didn't work for me. But there were some items I found enjoyable anyway, especially with the big bridge match between Paul Lukas and Ferdinand Gottschalk near the end of the film. It is treated like very much like a championship boxing match. Not only is the arena for the contest roped off in a square area like a boxing ring, there is a referee hovering between the contestants, and radio broadcaster Roscoe Karns delivers nonstop chatter on the happenings. At one point he even enumerates "One... Two... Three... Four..." as though a bid of four diamonds was a knockdown event. And people were glued to their radios for it all, a common event for championship boxing matches. That spoof worked very well indeed.

Unfortunately, few of the actors provide the comedy needed to sustain the intended satire. Paul Lukas doesn't have much of a flair for comedy and is miscast; lovely Loretta Young and the usual comic Frank McHugh weren't given good enough lines; Glenda Farrell has a nice comic turn as a forgetful blonde at the start of the film, but she practically disappears thereafter. What a waste of talent!

This may be the only full-length Hollywood film about contract bridge so I suppose you could as well call it the "War and Peace" or the "Abbott and Costello Go to Mars" of contract bridge films. The point is that it has as much connection with how bridge is played as its contemporary "Horsefeathers" has with how football is played. In case you missed it, Harpo Marx scores the winning touchdown in "Horsefeathers" while driving a horse-drawn garbage truck.

However, "Horsefeathers" did make some salient points about universities where football has priority over education and the administration pays professional "students" to play who never see the inside of a classroom. Of course that was back in the 1930s. Today's universities are ...

Never mind. Getting back to bridge, in 1931-32 the game enjoyed its fifteen minutes of fame with "The Bridge Battle of the Century" between Ely Culbertson and Sidney Lenz, with the winner getting to sell more books about his bidding system. The fifteen minutes were somewhat literal in this case as NBC radio broadcast a fifteen-minute summary of each day's action, which was also reported on the front pages of the nation's newspapers.

So just as "Horsefeathers" was more accurate about the milieu in which football was played than about how the game was played, "Grand Slam" has its fun with the idea of crowds gathered around radios and electronic news tickers for the latest results of a bridge match. It's also fairly accurate in depicting the whining, gloating and backbiting endemic among serious bridge players, of which I am one.

Aside from that, it's a lightweight romantic comedy of average quality. Nothing really "pre-code" about it. If you play bridge at all you may get a kick out of the ridiculousness of the few scenes where they're supposedly playing the game. If not, I hope this description of the film's circumstances will increase your enjoyment of it.

In a more leisurely era, lots of people played cards, bridge being one of the big games, and took the game very seriously. I had an old boss who hated cards because her relatives used to play and the next day, no one was speaking to anyone. I can remember my aunt and uncle getting into a big fight over bridge.

Bridge is still a big game, of course, and in this film, "Grand Slam," it's the biggest! Paul Lukas stars as a Russian waiter now in America who finds the game silly and develops his own system, the Stanislavsky system, which becomes all the rage.

At the urging of his ghost writer friend (Frank McHugh), he puts together a book about it, written by McHugh. This was probably inspired by the Russian bridge player Culbertson (I was once a member of the Culbertson Bridge Club) who made a big splash in that era.

Loretta Young plays his admiring girlfriend, who becomes his wife and partner in bridge on the radio (I guess they did everything on the radio), as the Stanislavsky method is supposed to keep couples from fighting. It doesn't.

Young is gorgeous and a bright presence as usual, and Paul Lukas plays it straight, which is perfect for his character. He was a fine dramatic actor but he did whatever the studio gave him, including, of all people, Philo Vance!

The movie has some fun things in it, including a performance by Glenda Farrell, and footage of the world stopping when the two great bridge players meet for their championship game - divers stop in mid-air, ocean waves stop, etc. - quite funny.

I used to stay up all night playing bridge and also whist, and this movie made me miss both of them. Unfortunately nowadays I'm too distracted to keep track of what's been played. That didn't seem to bother Paul Lukas - he just big 7 spades whenever anyone asked him for a bid.

Short, light film, with the beautiful Loretta and her amazing outfits.

1933 seemed to be a great year for satires ("Duck Soup" for instance) and this one fits in well even though it is about the obsession with contract bridge. The tone is like a humorous piece from The New Yorker, appropriate, since the film begins with the "Goings On About Town" page of that magazine. The only thing odd is the casting. Made a few years later William Powell and Myrna Loy would have been perfect. However, after 1934, you wouldn't have had adultery handled in such a sophisticated fashion, the young and beautiful Loretta Young in some shear and slinky outfits, or a group of prostitutes listening to a bridge contest on radio. Even if you know nothing about bridge, you may still want to check out a rare example of Hollywood satire.