Libeled Lady (MGM, 1936)

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

Last night (Sunday, September 22) Turner Classic Movies showed two well-known films under the unusual aegis of director Francis Ford Coppola, who co-hosted the night with Eddie Muller (usually their film noir guy). Coppola was there largely to promote his latest film, Megalopolis, an all-star movie that apparently ranges through different historical eras, from ancient Rome to the present, but for his guest programmer stint on TCM he chose two classic screwball comedies from the 1930’s, Libeled Lady and The Awful Truth. I’ve posted about The Awful Truth (a delightful comedy about the evils of jealousy, with Irene Dunne and Cary Grant as a married couple who separate amidst allegations of infidelity, only to reconcile at the end) in January 2024 as part of a three-film tribute to Columbia Pictures on their 100th anniversary as a going business (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-awful-truth-columbia-1937.html), so right now I’ll concentrate on Libeled Lady. It was made in 1936 by MGM with Lawrence Weingarten as producer and Jack Conway as director; Conway was a devout Christian Scientist and he was frequently MGM’s go-to choice for potentially censorable scripts since the studio bosses, Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, could count on him to tone down any salacious elements. (Conway directed Red-Headed Woman, Jean Harlow’s star-making film, in 1932 from a script by Anita Loos. He was so offended by one of Loos’s scenes that he refused to shoot it, telling Loos, “If you want that scene in the picture, you’ll have to direct it yourself” – which she did.)

The plot of Libeled Lady centers around heiress Connie Allenbury (Myrna Loy) and the New York Evening Star, which has just gone to press with a front-page story alleging that while in London Connie had had an affair with a married man. Unfortunately, the story is B.S., the concoction of a British reporter with a fondness for the bottle, and when the paper’s editor, Warren Haggerty (Spencer Tracy), gets word that the story has gone to press he immediately orders the presses stopped (though those words aren’t actually heard in the film) and all copies withdrawn from distribution so they can flush the libelous article down the memory hole. Unfortunately, Allenbury’s father, James B. Allenbury (Walter Connolly), has already received a copy from his New York lawyers, and leaps at the chance to put the Evening Star out of business once and for all since its publisher, Bane (Charley Grapewin), is a long-standing political enemy who once sandbagged Allenbury’s chances of getting elected to the U.S. Senate. So he has Connie file a libel suit against the Star for $5 million. To fight back, Haggerty rehires a famously mercurial reporter named Bill Chandler (William Powell) he let go previously and assigns him to the task of seducing Connie in order to entrap her into a real adulterous relationship. The one problem Haggerty has is that Chandler isn’t married, but Haggerty has a solution for that: he has Chandler marry Haggerty’s own girlfriend, Gladys Benton (Jean Harlow, top-billed and at her raucous best), so that later she can pose as the wronged wife and confront her supposedly errant husband when he’s making love to Connie (or coming as close thereof as the Production Code and Conway’s own scruples would allow).

Bill figures that the best way to get close to Connie Allenbury and her dad would be to feign an interest in James B. Allenbury’s favorite hobby, fishing. He takes an ocean liner to Britain just so he can arrange to be on the same ship as Connie and her father coming back, and he punches out a reporter (really a plant set up by Bill and Haggerty) who tries to interview her, winning her instant gratitude. Bill makes enough of an impression on both Allenburys he gets an invitation to a remote lake for their next fishing trip, and totally by accident he catches a huge trout called “Wall-Eye” whom James Allenbury has been after for years. (This gag was copied almost exactly 28 years later by veteran director Howard Hawks and writers Pat Frank, John Fenton Murray and Steven McNeil in Man’s Favorite Sport?, a lame attempt to revive the screwball-comedy genre, with Rock Hudson and Paula Prentiss.) Eventually Bill and Connie get close enough they have a moonlight swim together on the Allenbury estate, while Haggerty and Gladys get ready to crash their party – in both senses – and have the big scene that will spell the end of Connie’s libel suit. By this time Bill and Connie have actually got married, since Gladys had had a previous husband whom she’d divorced in Yucatán, Mexico, and the New York courts had ruled Mexican divorces unrecognized in the U.S. – but Gladys explains that after that she re-divorced her previous husband in Reno, and since New York recognizes Nevada divorces, she and Bill are still married and his marriage to Connie is bigamous. The film ends surprisingly ambiguously, with the four leads in the same frame but no clue as to how their various marital entanglements will be sorted out.

Libeled Lady is a sheer delight on all levels: the script by Maurine Dallas Watkins (original author of Chicago), Howard Emmett Rogers and George Oppenheimer (whose name ended up on the tail end of so many credits invariably people would come up to him at parties and “joke,” “I thought your name was And George Oppenheimer”) is lively and full of witty one-liners (my favorite was the early scene in which Haggerty confronts Bill while he’s getting over a bender and calls him an ape, and Bill dryly replies, “The ape objects”). Conway’s direction is fully self-assured, and fortunately he put aside any qualms he might have had about the raciness of the material. And the cast is first-rate: in the fifth of their 14 teamings William Powell and Myrna Loy are smoothly paired as usual; Spencer Tracy shows off his acting chops and his ability to do comedy (as I’ve noted before, screwball democratized movie comedy in that it was a sort of comedy that could be played by any actor instead of the specialists like Chaplin, Keaton, Langdon, Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers and W. C. Fields that had dominated it before), and Harlow is incomparable as usual. Her early death at age 26 the next year is not only a tragedy in itself, it deprived us of what she could have done later if she’d survived; I can readily imagine, on the strength of her femme fatale performance in The Beast of the City (1932), that she could have been quite effective in films noir. Ironically, though William Powell and Myrna Loy end up more or less together in this movie, Powell and Harlow were actually engaged when she died (though she was also dating another man, well-to-do publisher Donald Friede), though it’s hard to imagine them as an off-screen couple and eventually Powell married a minor MGM actress, Diana Lewis (best known as the O.K. female romantic lead in the 1940 Marx Brothers’ movie Go West), and stayed with her the rest of his life.