Man Wanted (Warner Bros., 1932)

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

After the 1934 Imitation of Life, TCM followed it with Man Wanted, a 1932 Warners programmer from the so-called “pre-Code” era about Lois Ames (Kay Francis), woman editor of The “400” Magazine, and her hapless husband Freddie Ames (Kenneth Thomson). Freddie is the proverbial upper-class twit who was born into money, went to Harvard University and since then has lived on his family’s (and his wife’s) income. Into the mix come French and Sprague sporting-goods salespeople Tom Sherman (David Manners) and ex-football star Andy Doyle (Andy Clyde). Tom is more or less engaged to Ruthie Holman (Una Merkel), the usual scratchy-voiced proletarian whose dad is offering Tom a job, but at the moment he’s employed at the sports store run by Mr. Walters (Edward Van Sloan, reunited with Manners from the cast of Dracula). The two cross paths with Lois when she orders a rowing machine and Tom shows up to deliver it. He just happens to arrive as Lois has just fired her long-suffering middle-aged woman secretary, Miss Harper (Elizabeth Patterson), for complaining about how late Lois keeps her at the office and saying she has to keep breaking dates to work Lois’s long hours. Tom volunteers to help out, saying he’s also a college man (though he doesn’t say what college) and, while he can’t type, he learned shorthand so he could take lecture notes and therefore can take Lois’s dictation. Midway through the movie the principals leave town for a weekend at a fancy resort, and Tom comes along as Lois’s secretary while Freddie takes an interest in another woman, Ann Le Maire (Claire Dodd, who specialized in playing the home-wrecker who came between the nice young couple). Tom has already risen from merely Lois’s secretary to her de facto assistant editor, with commensurate raises in pay from $50 per week to $100, $150 and finally $250.

In the end Ruthie ends up bailing on her engagement to Tom because she’s tired of his long absences at work, she takes up with Andy instead (well, since Andy Clyde and Una Merkel have such grating voices, they’re clearly made for each other – Merkel was actually a nuanced actress whose best performance was probably as Ann Rutledge in D. W. Griffith’s underrated 1930 biopic Abraham Lincoln, but here she’s just a stereotypical comic-relief character), Freddie dumps Lois for Ann, and with their divorce pending Lois and Tom can finally get together. The writers do most (though not all) of the predictable gags about people being surprised that the editor of The “400” Magazine is – gasp! – a woman, but what really was refreshing about this film was the revelation that David Manners actually had a sense of humor. So far I’d seen him in his Universal horror films Dracula, The Mummy and The Black Cat (ironically, he actually hated making Dracula and to the end of his life he refused to watch the movie) and also in a marvelous performance in Frank Capra’s 1931 film The Miracle Woman as a veteran blinded in World War I who’s inspired not to commit suicide by a broadcast by evangelist Barbara Stanwyck (playing a character obviously based on Aimée Semple McPherson). Manners was also Katharine Hepburn’s fiancé in her first film, A Bill of Divorcement (1932) – though in the end she refuses to marry him because she’s worried any kids they have will inherit her father’s (John Barrymore) insanity. What I hadn’t realized from these parts was that Manners actually not only could play comedy, but could play it surprisingly well; his character here is the sort of part that would later make a star of Cary Grant. Directed by William Dieterle from a script by Robert Lord (“story”) and Charles Kenyon (“adaptation”), and photographed by Gregg Toland nine years before he would shoot the greatest film ever made about publishing, Citizen Kane (Charles joked that Toland’s mood lighting was able to make typing visually interesting), Man Wanted is a forgotten gem that’s recently been rediscovered by feminist critics, even though (unlike in the 1934 Imitation of Life) it’s not clear at the end whether Lois is going to keep her job or give it up in favor of man, home and family.