The Gay Bride

Carole Lombard came over from Paramount to star in this MGM film The Gay Bride with Chester Morris. This is a part that fits her like OJ's glove should have fit OJ, a nice wisecracking chorus girl who makes no bones about the fact that she wants a hefty bank balance for her husband.

As chorus girl you don't get to meet the cream of society unless they are out slumming. And speakeasies she frequents usually means gangsters who had the money during Prohibition.

Her cap is set for Nat Pendleton though personally she can't stand him. Pendleton is his usual amiable lug who can't resist giving her anything. Muscle he is, brains he's not.

Lombard who winds up with the only tangible assets when Pendleton is killed has to still go through Sam Hardy and Leo Carrillo before she winds up with Chester Morris, Pendleton's sharp assistant who knows that there is a limited future when Prohibition is repealed.

Morris and Lombard play well off each other. Laughs come in The Gay Bride at the expense of Nat Pendleton. Also from Lombard's sidekick Zasu Pitts who is great at being Zasu Pitts.

This is a good screwball comedy in the Carole Lombard tradition.

Easy to see why Lombard was the highest paid actress in Hollywood at one time. Breathtakingly beautiful and with a wonderful sense of humor. That said, The Gay Bride is a fun movie but very much on the modest side. An amusing trifle about a heartless, gold-digging chorus girl bent on marrying one gangster after another, only to see them wiped out before she can get her hands on the cash. Chester Morris, a gangster's book-keeper, the one true love interest - whom of course she despises because he has no money. Amusing sparks struck between the two that provides the main thrust of the comedy. The great Zasu Pitts in a wisecracking supporting role. Not a great movie but a few good laughs - and a chance to see Lombard at her most luminous. Worth the time.

Carole Lombard is great, it's somewhat forgotten how good she was at delivering the one liners. She gets off some good ones as the golddigging chorus line girl who marries a gangster. The fact that the life expectancy of a gangster is short only complicates her plans. The film goes a off the rails when she falls for one of them. It would have been more fun to watch her carry on as she had but she is still worth watching. Zazu Pitts in a funny supporting role.

This lesser-known film is a very pleasant, not really expected surprise in the early career of Carole Lombard, at the moment it was really starting to take off. It offers her as many opportunities to start showing the full range of her acting skills as more well-known films of the same period such as Twentieth Century - while being clearly less ambitious, I find it also much more tightly scripted than the latter and her co-star Chester Morris whom I did not know is surprisingly good, while all supporting characters are top-notch as well. Basically this is just a comedy in the mob's' world of the Prohibition, though, but it is both a fast-paced and smartly-acted one, and with two main characters which actually are fairly original. Mary is a gold digger with no more moral compass than a boiled clam. She considers herself fully entitled, by the rights of a penniless lonely woman who has to fend for herself, to put her hands on any pot of gold no matter how - so far nothing that original, one thinks of the gritty character of Barbara Stanwyck in Baby Face the same year. However Carole Lombard makes Mary so breezily, unconsciously and innocently amoral, if one may say, that even when she drives her would-be gangster benefactors to kill one another in order to provide her with the booty she greedily and self-mindedly covets, nobody seems really able to keep her a grudge. That makes her a sort of screwball cousin of Lulu / Pandora, the innocent fatal woman who made an unforgettable icon of Louise Brooks. She is toxic, even lethally so, but that's not really her fault - and she's so pretty... One who is not really able to blame her is her co-hero, the even more originally scripted bodyguard-cum-bookkeeper (!!) character strangely nicknamed Office Boy. This is a hero who talks a lot and acts fairly little, though he knows how to keep being respected by the violent mobsters he knowingly works for, while refusing to get involved in the dirty parts of their trade. But, mind you, not because he feels them repulsive, if that was the case he should have quit much earlier. No, rather because he feels this is not worth the risks to him, he prefers the idea of a fixed, not so big though adequate salary, which he can earn without having to spoil his hands. Not a full-fledged gangster, certainly, but not really a knight in a shining armour of moral rectitude either. Office Boy insistently tries to dissuade Mary of marrying Shoots Magiz, the top gangster who is really crazy about her and later becomes an irreproachably devoted husband - again not for moral reasons but just because as a partner for a long and quiet married life, Shoot offers limited perspectives, which gets confirmed to have been quite true. Later on as he tries again to object to Mary's shenanigans finding ways to get rich with dirty money, his arguments keep on being the same - not that her ways are evil, but that they are very likely to put her into deep trouble. True again. And when he leaves the mob, one cannot be too sure that it is because he finally saw the light about these evil ways - rather that the gang war makes them too unsafe, and he prefers quitting once he has put aside enough money to live the quiet, modest life he craves. Interesting mob character indeed.

Love classic film and there are numerous great, some classic even, examples of films that mix comedy, drama and crime mystery. But my main reason for seeing the film was Carole Lombard (before she became the wife of Clark Gable), a lovely very talented actress who died tragically far too young with so much more to give, in her only film for MGM.

It may not be one of Lombard's best films, and it doesn't contain one of her overall best performances (not a knock against her), and would hesitate in calling it great. Instead it is an uneven but interesting and entertaining film, that would have been better if the story was more focused. There was a lot of potential, considering the cast and that the script was penned by successful playwrights that were far from inexperienced. Potential that could have been lived up to more, not a complete squandering by all means though.

The best thing is the cast. Lombard looks luminous and is both witty and charming. Chester Morris is a terrific male lead and perhaps gives the best performance in the role, he has great comic timing and has the right amount of intensity. He and Lombard work wonderfully together, with their banter snappy and their delivery and chemistry sparkling. The supporting cast on the most part also fare well, Leo Carrillo enjoys himself in his role as does ZaSu Pitts in her too short screen time.

Visually, the production values are stylish and elegant. Much of the script is tight and witty, with plenty of laugh out loud funny moments, and the story does compel on the most part and never dull if more in the comedy-oriented parts. It's all competently, if slightly uninspiredly, directed.

However, the material is a little on the slight side, with there not being quite enough to fill the length (the film is not a long one). The story generally could have been more focused, tonally it is a bit of a mishmash of comedy and crime melodrama. The comedy elements fare much better.

While intriguing and with moments of suspense, the crime melodrama lacks surprises and can get preposterous, with some silly character decisions. Nat Pendelton also came over as rather colourless in an indecisively written dim-witted role.

All in all, uneven but worth the look for Lombard and Morris especially. 6/10 Bethany Cox