Platinum Blonde (Columbia, 1931)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, December 26), with all the late-night TV shows doing reruns for the last week of the year, my husband Charles and I watched a quite engaging film on Turner Classic Movies: Platinum Blonde, a 1931 romantic comedy directed by Frank Capra (or “Frank R. Capra,” as he was still billing himself then) and starring Loretta Young, Robert Williams and Jean Harlow (in that order!) in a wild tale about a super-rich family, the Schuylers (a real family who loom large in the history of New York’s 1 percent). Michael Schuyler (Donald Dillaway), son of matriarch Mrs. Schuyler (Louise Closser Hale), has got himself in trouble with a chorus girl whom he wrote letters to of a stupefying banality. We never see her, but she’s already extracted $10,000 as a settlement from the Schuyler family to avoid a nasty public scandal and a breach-of-promise suit. Reporter Stew Smith (Robert Williams) shows up at the Schuyler home, along with Bingy Baker (the marvelous character comedian Walter Catlett), a reporter for a competing newspaper. Bingy accepts a $50 bribe from the Schuylers’ attorney, Grayson (Reginald Owen), to forget about the story, but Stew tricks the Schuylers into confirming the story and naming the amount they paid the chorus girl to settle it. Only Stew has attracted the attentions of Michael’s sister Anne (Jean Harlow); they start dating and eventually they elope. Bingy finds out about it and “breaks” the story in his own paper – thereby getting Stew’s editor, Conroy (Edmund Breese), pissed at him because he didn’t give the story to him instead. Stew wants Anne to forsake her 1-percenter lifestyle and live with him in his flat, but Anne insists that he move in with her in the Schuyler mansion, where his new mother-in-law has promised them a wing in the big house. The media covering the marriage of Anne Schuyler to Stew Smith dub him the “Cinderella Man” – an appellation he finds humiliating (later Capra would reuse the “Cinderella Man” phrase in a far more famous film, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town) – and though he continues rather desultorily to work as a reporter, he also starts writing a play but he can’t get any farther than the opening line detailing where it takes place.

In case you’re wondering where Loretta Young fits into this, she’s Gallagher, a young woman who’s part of the staff of Stew’s paper (though exactly what she does there remains something of a mystery), and though she and Stew are nothing more than co-workers and friends it’s obvious that writers Jo Swerling and Robert Riskin (in his first direct collaboration with Capra; Capra’s immediately previous film, The Miracle Woman, had been based on a play by Riskin called Bless You, Sister! but he didn’t work on the movie, and the writing credits for Platinum Blonde list Harry E. Chandlee and Douglas W. Churchill for the original story, Swerling for “adaptation” and Riskin for “dialogue”) are setting Gallagher up to be the true love of Stew Smith once his foray into “marrying up” ends dismally. The crisis comes when Stew invites his friends from the paper for a drunken party at the Schuyler home. Gallagher shows up and they start working on the play together once she convinces him that he knows nothing about Siberia, Araby or Norway (the locales he’s attempted before) and he should write something about his own experience. They start working and in nothing flat they have an outline and a complete Act I. Act II comes about when Anne Schuyler Smith catches Stew and Gallagher together (the one scene in the film in which Jean Harlow and Loretta Young both appear) and of course assumes the worst. We’ve already seen Anne getting cruised by a daredevil pilot (Bill Elliott) who’s previously flown around the world at a party to which Gallagher gained admittance by replacing the paper’s indisposed society editor, so the writers have lined up a replacement beau for her if and when she and Stew break up. (In a later and much better-known Capra-Riskin film, It Happened One Night, the heiress’s beau is also an aviator, though he’s a pretentious twit and in the end she dumps him for roughneck reporter Clark Gable.) Ultimately, in an engaging life-imitates-art-imitates-life finish, Gallagher tells Stew their play should end with the reporter pairing up with “O’Brien,” a character Gallagher has inserted based on herself, and as the two finish the play with that ending Stew and Gallagher pair up for real. There’s a neat worm-turning ending in which Anne offers to write Stew a settlement check and Stew virtuously turns it down.

Platinum Blonde is a movie I’ve seen before and been lukewarm about, but this time it clicked for me and I was with it totally. It’s got a lot of bad press over the years, partly due to the odd casting of the female leads. Audiences familiar with the later career trajectories of Jean Harlow and Loretta Young often wonder why Capra cast Harlow as the upper-class socialite and Young as the down-to-earth newspaper girl – based on their subsequent films one would have assumed it would be the other way around – but Harlow was actually from at least an upper-middle-class background. Like Humphrey Bogart’s father, Harlow’s father was a doctor and she grew up in relative affluence even though as an actress she played mostly lower-class characters. Platinum Blonde is also a sad film in that two of its stars died tragically young (of medical conditions that could probably have been successfully treated today); you knew about Jean Harlow but Robert Williams caught peritonitis and died while rehearsing his next film, a Constance Bennett vehicle at RKO called Lady With a Past, so he was gone permanently just four days after the release of the film that should have made him a star. According to a Robert Williams biography on imdb.com, when Platinum Blonde was first released on home video in the 1980’s audiences attracted to it by the legendary names – Harlow, Young, Capra – wondered who Robert Williams was and why they’d never heard of him. His character is the typical wisecracking reporter usually played in films of this period by Lee Tracy, but Williams is a good deal less annoying and more debonair. He comes off as a combination of William Powell and Cary Grant, both of whom later played similar roles (Powell in Libeled Lady – also with Harlow! – and Grant in His Girl Friday), and his dry wit and underlying sensitivity marked him as an actor of real promise, tragically unfulfilled.

Platinum Blonde also marks a road-not-taken for Frank Capra, who, aided by cinematographer Joseph Walker (who later shot most of Capra’s famous films), creates some hauntingly beautiful romantic images. These include a scene of Robert Williams and Jean Harlow necking, shot through a fountain on the Schuyler estate the way Josef von Sternberg was already famous for doing and Joseph H. Lewis would do in the 1940’s. Also Capra and Walker quite effectively use the massive staircase that separates the two floors of the Schuyler mansion for crane shots that anticipate what Orson Welles and Stanley Cortez did in The Magnificent Ambersons a decade later. And the floor of the Schuyler living room, with its inlaid black-and-white trapezoidal tiles, becomes a character in and of itself, especially when Stew irreverently plays hopscotch on them. Film critic Don Miller once argued that “the screen lost a director of great romantic power when Frank Capra became the cinematic propagandist for the New Deal” – and while that’s a strange thing to say about Capra, a lifelong Republican who voted against Franklin Roosevelt all four times (people who met Capra after seeing his films were often startled by how Right-wing his actual politics were), the “great romantic power” is quite obvious and apparent in this and other early Capras until he pretty much abandoned sensuality after the marvelous outdoor twilight love scene between Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable in It Happened One Night. Platinum Blonde is best remembered as an important film in the ascent to superstardom of Jean Harlow – who was, after all, playing the title role – but it emerges today as an excellent romantic comedy which presents class conflicts considerably more adroitly and engagingly than Capra did in his later films, even the ones in which he still had Robert Riskin as his writer.