I'm giving this one a 7/10 just based on the chemistry of Clark Gable and Joan Crawford alone! If it had been some other couple playing the leads this would only have warranted about a 5/10.
It's another take on one of Joan's shop girl roles that MGM so often cast her in, except here she (Marian) works in a box factory. The rather boorish Al Manning (Wallace Ford) thinks Marian is his for the asking, but Marian has bigger ideas. She has a conversation with a very drunk and wealthy Wally (Skeets Gallagher) who is enjoying the night air on the caboose of a train in the train yard, and he gives her his card and tells her to come see him.
Now Marian goes home to mom and an angry Al - he smells the liquor on her breath - and they have it out. She says she is leaving town and going to meet up with Wally in New York. She says that if she was a man they'd think it was right for her to use her brains to get what she can however she can. Now that last statement is an odd one because Marian behaves quite naively for the next 15 minutes of the film, not brainy at all. She DOES go to New York and she DOES look up Wally...who has little or no memory of her and is displeased to see her. But she catches him in one of his rare sober moments and he tells her upfront the invitation was never sincere, neither is he, and NO he will not introduce her to any of his rich friends. Marian is dejected and ejected. Her lucky break? Two of Wally's rich friends are on the way into his apartment as she leaves and she simply follows them back in. She just plainly asks them if they are rich and single because she has no time to waste on them if they are not!
Now this is all very stupid obvious behavior from Marian, who could easily have become a sadder but wiser girl if any of these men had the drive or ambition to make her one, but she lucks out. Gable's character (Mark Whitney) takes an instant liking to her honesty - you'll find out later why exactly, and the two are an instant couple, but not a married couple, for the next three years, traveling the globe together. Whitney even gives her a fake name and identity - Mrs. Moreland, a divorcée - so they can explain her expensive lifestyle as emanating from alimony. Mark shows her how to speak, how to dress, how to command a household of servants, how to host a dinner party - a complete makeover from the country mouse she was.
Then complications arise. Marian wants marriage that Mark won't give her, and New York's political machine wants Mark to become governor- and that means no mistress. How will this all work out? Watch and find out.
Like I said, nothing unusual here for early 30's MGM - the shop girl and the wealthy guy and the entailing Cinderella transformation, the small minded small town boyfriend, the mom who waits back home with a light in the window, the respectability that a mistress never has, etc. But every time Gable and Crawford are together you can feel the electricity - which was real by the way. The two had an affair for years but never got married because they figured they'd fight as man and wife.
And then there are a couple of coincidences. Here Joan takes on the identity of a divorcée and is taught the etiquette her station as Mark's companion will require. In 1950 she is also given a new name "Lorna Hanson Forbes" and the identity of a divorcée so she can be a married gangster's social companion and mistress with no questions asked. Then there is a film starring Joan with an identical name - "Possessed" - made in 1947. It has a completely different storyline though and is made by a different studio - Warner Brothers.
I'd say watch it, try not to get put out by the forgettable plot with a rather unsatisfactory ending and just note the great chemistry between Gable and Crawford, and really good acting in the supporting roles especially by Skeets Gallagher and Wallace Ford. Recommended.
