by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Snowed
Under, fourth and last in the
recordings I made from TCM of films featuring Glenda Farrell (they actually did
a whole day of her movies as part of the “Summer Under the Stars” series last
August, but most of the others they showed — including acknowledged classics
like Little Caesar, Mystery of the Wax Museum and the Gold Diggers movies in which she appeared, as well as some of
the Torchy Blane series films — were items I already had) and an engaging
little 1936 comedy that’s a pretty obvious ripoff of Seven Keys to Baldpate. Broadway producer Arthur Layton (Porter Hall) is
exasperated because the continued existence of his company is dependent on the
success of a new play by his star writer, Alan Tanner (George Brent,
top-billed). Only Tanner’s writing has fallen off drastically in the two years
since he broke up with his first wife, Alice Merritt (Genevieve Tobin, who was
probably relieved for once to be playing the “good girl” instead of the femme
fatale who broke up the hero’s
relationship with the “good girl”!), who set up an interior-design salon after
the divorce but isn’t doing too well financially. On the rebound — the term is
actually used in the script by Laurence Saunders, F. Hugh Herbert and Brown
Holmes — Tanner married Daisy Lowell (Glenda Farrell), only that marriage also
soured and left Tanner single again with an outstanding alimony bill of $1,200
— which he has no way of paying unless he can come up with a workable third act
to the play he’s working on for Layton. Tanner decides to repair to his country
house in Bridgeport, Connecticut for the weekend and crank out a new third act
to replace the three he’s already written and Layton has rejected as
unproducably terrible — only his sanctum sanctorum is invaded by Alice (sent there by Layton to see
if she can inspire him to a great third act the way she used to when they were
married), local sheriff’s deputy Orlando Rowe (Frank McHugh, even whinier than
usual if such a thing is possible), attorney McBride (John Eldredge) who’s
representing Rosie in her suit for back alimony, Rosie herself and Tanner’s
current girlfriend, Pat Quinn (Patricia Ellis), a nice and naïve young girl who
hasn’t the foggiest notion what she’s getting herself into.
With all three
women in Tanner’s life — past, present (or more recently past) and (presumably)
future — on the scene with him in a remote locale, Snowed Under begins to seem like a straight version of a Jane
Chambers play (Chambers was a pioneering Lesbian playwright who died of cancer
in 1983; her plays generally centered around a Lesbian who invited her past,
present and hopefully future girlfriends to an isolated spot for the weekend),
and though the conflicts aren’t all that interesting it’s still a very entertaining and reasonably amusing film.
George Brent is playing a light enough role that his deficiencies as an actor —
his stiffness and woodenness (judging from Bette Davis’s comments about him
over the years, he probably got a lot of parts mainly because his female
co-stars wanted to bed him; she describes him in person as devastatingly
attractive but he comes off on screen as just rather ordinarily good-looking,
the reverse of legends like Valentino and Monroe whose friends described them
as no more than decently attractive in person but who radiated irresistible
sensuality on screen) — aren’t much of a problem this time around. Genevieve
Tobin is actually surprisingly credible as the voice of reason — the payoff is
that she and Brent are going to reconcile and Layton ends up with two third acts for his play, one written by Tanner at
his maid’s home and one by Alice — and Patricia Ellis is good as the nice girl
we don’t want to see drawn into
Tanner’s crazy life. Eventually the writers and director Ray Enright (a hack as
usual, but at least an energetic cog in the Warners machine — though this is
one of those movies that’s a Warner Bros. production in the opening credits and
a First National picture in the closing ones) pair off Tanner and Alice, Pat
and lawyer McBride, and Rosie with Orlando (as in Mystery of the Wax Museum,
they stick Glenda Farrell
with Frank McHugh at the end and once again waste this very talented actress in
a “stick” gold-digger role) — and they don’t make as much as they could have of
the irony that the play Tanner is working on mirrors his own life: it’s about a
man who leaves one woman, falls for another but doesn’t stay with her either.
Instead he decides he hates women and goes off on his own — and that’s where
his third-act troubles begin; I joked that in a modern play with this premise
he’d probably realize that he’s Gay, but they didn’t do that sort of thing in a
1936 movie!
