I adore Carole Lombard and was looking forward to seeing this early starring vehicle. Lombard's initial Paramount films in her starlet years were hit and miss, but when she was loaned out to Columbia that so-called "poverty row" studio gave her the red carpet treatment, with beautiful photography, elegant productions, and above all, good roles and scripts, as was the case with "Virtue", "No More Orchids", "Lady By Choice", and eventually, "Twentieth Century", the film that made her a major star. The one Columbia vehicle I hadn't seen was "Brief Moment" and it was not only the one dud in the bunch it also gives Lombard her least appealing character ever, more of a castrator than the helpful spouse she is suggested to be.
Social heir Rodney Deane (Gene Raymond) has fallen in love with sexy nightclub singer Abby Fane (Lombard). He proposes but she is wary how his affluent family will react to her. He brings her briefly to meet the folks where she spends all of five minutes in their presence. They are cordial but frosty and it's clear to the couple they don't approve of the match. The duo go ahead with their plans, apparently cutting the family off completely and then going to Paris for a months-long honeymoon. Returning from the trip, Abby is annoyed that Rodney's best friend Sig (Monroe Owsley) has gone ahead and furnished their new apartment without any request from them although Rodney is happy with the results. Six months into the marriage, Abby is tired of their nightly socializing and bar-hopping and especially the eternal presence of Sig in their lives who she thinks is a bad influence. Abby all but demands Rodney go out and get a job (they've been living on $4,000 a month checks from Deane Sr., though apparently neither of them has bothered with the family since the honeymoon) or she'll leave him. Rodney gets a job on the ground floor of his father's business but is so bored with the low-level job he quits without telling Abby and is off to old tricks, hanging out at the racetrack with Sig when he pretends to be at the office.
This movie is rather boring to begin with but Lombard's character further wrecks the story. First, it's hard to believe a posh nightclub singer would have such an unyielding middle-class mentality that a man has to work even if he doesn't need the money and her delusionment with Raymond seems strange given this this the Rodney she had always known when dating, the on the town playboy. Sig at one point refers to Rodney as "henpecked" and while that's not what the screenwriters were suggesting, it's undeniably true, Abby tells Rodney what he is to do with his life and there is no if's, and's or but's for her. Her control freak edge is indicated early with her cutting his family completely out of their lives after one five-minute meeting, never trying to make build bridges and make amends and yet the movie makes it like Abby is in the right at all times. The script clearly has an anti-upper classes stance that presumes the general working-class moviegoing public of the era will agree that the rich are the real ones without class.
Lombard is gorgeous in this as always but this unpleasant characterization is hard to take. When she's not barking orders, Abby is crying - more than getting a job, Rodney needs to run like hell! I hate the see the wonderful Carole playing such a harpie Gene Raymond was never one of the better actors among the era's leading men but he's ok here. Arthur Hohl as Abby's sole friend, the unhandsome nightclub owner who has an unrequited love for her is the one sympathetic character in the film. Sole acting honors go to Monroe Owsley as caustic, shallow buddy, Sig, a role in which the famous theatre critic Alexander Woolcott made his stage acting debut to great acclaim.
I could not believe this dull, anti-rich drama was based on an S. N. Berhman play. Behrman made his name for his social comedies on the stage and this would really be biting the hand that buttered his bread. I looked up the plot of the play and while Abby and Rodney are both nightclub singer and playboy in it, there's little else in common with this hokum. In the play, Rodney proposes to Abby because he likes her drive, having none of his own. She admits he's not the love of her life but she agrees to marry him for the chance to crash society. When Abby again meets the playboy polo player who was her true love but wouldn't marry her, she plots to humilate him as he did her, flirting with him as if they might resume their affair as they hit the town and cause a scandal. Her plans backfire though and it's Rodney who wants out and Abby realizes she needs to stick with what she has, even if it burns out after a "brief moment". Behrman's play was a sharp comedy but certainly Hollywood was not going to make a glib movie about semi-open marriages in the 1930's so screenwriters Brian Marlow and Edith Fitzgerald came up with this bucket of self-righteous slop. Hopefully Behrman was well paid for the bastardization.
