Girls About Town (Paramount, 1931)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles came home unexpectedly early last night and I grabbed the opportunity to run him another DVD from my recent stack of grey-label acquisitions: Girls About Town, a 1931 Paramount production directed by the very young George Cukor from a script by Zoë Akins, who’d been writing irreverent stories about sexually liberated women using their bodies and their wiles to get ahead for almost two decades. Akins also wrote Katharine Hepburn’s second and third films, Christopher Strong (a marvelous movie that puts an unusually intense spin on a familiar soap-opera plot by her literate writing, equally insightful work by Lesbian director Dorothy Arzner, and the marvelous anti-type casting of Hepburn and Colin Clive as adulterous lovers) and Morning Glory (an O.K. comedy about a stage-struck woman who ecomes a star on Broadway, virtually non-directed by Lowell Sherman; Hepburn won the Academy Award for Morning Glory rather than the two much better films she made in 1933, Christopher Strong and George Cukor’s Little Women).

Akins’ best-known work is probably her play The Greeks Had a Word for It, about three women who pool their resources to rent a fancy apartment and pose as more well-to-do than they are in order to “hook” rich men to marry them. It’s been filmed several times under titles like Three Broadway Girls, Moon Over Miami and, most famously, How to Marry a Millionaire in 1953, with Marilyn Monroe, Betty Grable and Lauren Bacall as the girls. Girls About Town casts Kay Francis and Lilyan Tashman (whose career trajectory and typecasting is exemplified by the fact that her first film, made in 1920, was called Experience and cast her as “Pleasure”! She survived the silent-to-sound transition but died young at 37 in 1934) as so-called “entertainment girls” whose job it is to go on dinner dates with potential business partners of their rather slimy employer, Jerry Chase (Alan Dinehart, who’s O.K. in a pretty nothing role but hardly at the level of his superb villain performances in Supernatural and A Study in Scarlet), who in a marvelous opening scene have worked out a clever scam to avoid having to invite their “pigeons” to their apartments for any actual down-’n’-dirty. They show a silhouette in their window that’s supposedly their mother waiting up for them, but she’s really their maid Hattie (Louise Beavers, then the go-to heavy-set Black woman for “mammy” roles until Hattle McDaniel replaced her) waiting up for them and helping them preserve what’s left of their virtue.

Their lives turn around when they’re invited to a yacht party featuring Wisconsin copper baron Benjamin Thomas (Eugene Pallette) and his hunky young assistant, Jim Baker (a young and callow-looking Joel McCrea, who’d later become a first-rate comic actor – especially under Preston Sturges’ direction – but seems oddly unformed here). With that basic information you can pretty much write the plot yourself: Wanda Howard (Kay Francis) genuinely falls for Jim and accepts his marriage proposal, while Marie Bailey (Lilyan Tashman) vamps Benjamin and gets him to buy her $50,000 worth of jewels, then more or less blackmails him to give most of the swag to his wife (Lucile Gleason, real-life wife of comedian James Gleason), who’s been complaining about his stinginess throughout the 13 years of their marriage. There’s a complication in that Wanda has a husband already, Alex Howard (Anderson Lawlor), who demands a $10,000 settlement from Jim – which leads Jim to think he’s being blackmailed and Wanda is in on it. There’s a nice sequence in which Wanda calls all her gold-digging girlfriends together and auctions off the various items she’s extracted from her boyfriends over the years to raise the $10,000 to reimburse Jim for the money he paid Alex in hopes of convincing him she really loves him and wasn’t out to swindle him. Eventually Wanda traces Alex to his apartment and finds he’s living with a woman who’s desperately ill – the money he extracted from Jim went to pay for her medical care – and also that she’s not married to him after all, since he secretly divorced her in Mexico two years earlier. It ends pretty much as you’d expect it to, with Jim and Wanda safely paired up while Marie gives Jerry (ya remember Jerry?) a call saying she’s once again available for “entertainment girl” work, but now she works alone.

There’s nothing really wrong with Girls About Town but there’s nothing that much right about it, either. George Cukor’s direction is one of those they-had-to-start-somewhere credits; he fills the film with some dazzling montage sequences, including one showing the girls and their boyfriends de jour (de nuit, really) getting more and more schnozzled on champagne, and another in which to liven up the party aboard the yacht Benjamin invites more women over and we get a lot of shots of their asses, all clad in black swimsuits, as they dive off the boat into the water to fetch a dissolving golf ball the prank-loving Benjamin throws overboard and promises $3,000 to the first girl who recovers one. (The “balls” are novelty items that dissolve in water like Alka-Seltzers, but Marie outwits Benjamin by substituting a real golf ball.) But for the most part this is a pretty plainly directed film, and it doesn’t help that Kay Francis is miscast in the sort of role Joan Blondell could have played to perfection (and did in the first film version of Akins’ play The Greeks Had a Word for It, made in 1932 and even in that so-called “pre-Code” era retitled at the Production Code Administration’s insistence to The Greeks Had a Word for Them, then further retitled Three Broadway Girls for a 1938 “post-Code” reissue). Indeed, the whole movie looks like a Warner Bros. film in exile, and it’s not difficult to imagine how Warners would have cast it – Joan Blondell as Wanda, Glenda Farrell as Marie and Guy Kibbee as Benjamin. Ironically, when Warner Bros. actually did lure Kay Francis away from Paramount, they mostly put her in soap operas and didn’t give her roles like this one – though they gave her two genuinely great films, One-Way Passage with fellow Paramount refugee William Powell and the quite remarkable Florence Nightingale biopic, The White Angel.