Smart Woman (RKO, 1931)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, May 1) my husband Charles and I watched two films I’d ordered on DVD from Amazon.com after missing their recent showings on Turner Classic Movies. One was a 1931 romantic comedy/melodrama called Smart Woman from RKO, directed by Gregory La Cava from a script credited to one “Salisbury Field” (isn’t that a place in England? No, that’s Salisbury Plain) based on a play called Nancy’s Private Affair by one Myron C. Fagan. (Nancy’s Private Affair would have been a better title for the movie, too.) I say the script was “credited to” Salisbury Field because La Cava was famous for letting his actors improvise their dialogue on set, though he didn’t seem to be doing much of that here. I’d been curious about Smart Woman when I saw it on the TCM schedule – alas, they were showing it on a Thursday at 4:30 a.m. – but it turned out to be a pretty standard-issue tale of actual or potential extra-relational activity on the part of an erring husband whose wife decides to fight back against the gold-digging seductress who’s got her hooks into him. The wife is Nancy Gibson (Mary Astor), whom we first meet on a ship taking her back home to upstate New York from Paris, where she’d gone to take care of her sick mother. Nancy is sorely disappointed that her husband Donald (Robert Ames) isn’t there to meet her when her boat docks. Instead she’s greeted by his sister, Sally Gibson Ross (Ruth Weston), and her husband, Donald’s business partner Billy Ross (Edward Everett Horton, relatively restrained). They tell Nancy that Donald is on a business trip to Philadelphia, but eventually the truth emerges: he’s in the clutches of Peggy Preston (Noel Francis), a blonde hussy whose seduction of Donald is being masterminded by her mother (Gladys Gale).

Fortunately, in winning back her husband Nancy has a secret weapon: a British lord, Sir Guy Harrington (John Halliday), who met her on board ship and cruised her, but when she said she wasn’t interested because she had the perfect marriage, he withdrew gracefully and the two became friends – but no more – for the rest of the voyage. Nancy invites Peggy, her mother and Sir Guy to spend the weekend with them at the palatial Gibson mansion (this is one of those films Rian Johnson talked about on TCM last Saturday that dealt with the Depression by ignoring it completely), where she tries to arouse her husband’s jealousy by saying she and Sir Guy are having an affair and therefore it’s O.K. with her if they divorce. Nancy also drops hints to Peggy and her mom that her husband Donald is really broke (he isn’t), and there’s a great scene in which the moment Peggy lays eyes on the big black Rolls-Royce in which Sir Guy drove there, she immediately decides to vamp him instead because he’s obviously fatter pickings than Donald Gibson. Only once she’s definitively abandoned Donald, Sir Guy tells her in no uncertain terms that he’s absolutely not interested in anything beyond a casual fling with her, and the 68-minute movie lumbers to the predictable close in which Donald and Nancy reconcile.

Smart Woman is noteworthy more as the final film by Robert Ames than for any intrinsic quality (or lack thereof): Ames was a heavy-duty alcoholic who burned through four marriages (to actresses Helen Muriel Oakes, Vivienne Segal – who later appeared in the premieres of classic musicals by Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart – Frances Goodrich and Alice L. Gerry, and he was dating Ina Claire at the end) and ultimately died of delirium tremens at just 42. Ames’s biggest break was when Gloria Swanson picked him as her leading man in her first talkie, The Trespasser (1929), which was the biggest hit of her career. (Swanson is often lumped in with other major silent stars as one who didn’t make the talkie transition successfully, but The Trespasser was her most successful film ever and her subsequent career collapse had more to do with Joseph P. Kennedy’s control over her parts and her personal as well as professional relationship with him, as well as her age: she was 30 when sound came in, an awkward age for actresses then and now.) Ames’s real-life story would make a much more interesting (if unduly depressing) movie than Smart Woman, which for much of its running time comes off as a straight version of a Jane Chambers play. (Jane Chambers was an openly Lesbian playwright whose works frequently centered around a Lesbian who spends a summer weekend with a whole bunch of her girlfriends – past, present and hopefully future.) Smart Woman is an O.K. movie – nothing special despite La Cava’s involvement (he was a quirky and uneven director whose masterpiece is the 1937 film Stage Door, a showcase for Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers and a marvelous movie about aspiring actresses; he also made the 1936 film My Man Godfrey, a screwball comedy with William Powell and Carole Lombard, but that’s a movie I respect more than I actually enjoy, and the 1934 political drama Gabriel Over the White House, produced by William Randolph Hearst and openly advocating for an American dictatorship to end the Depression). It’s just your standard-issue melodrama about a couple who are tempted to break up their marriage, but ultimately don’t.