After playing a number of gangster's molls in movies like "The Public Enemy," and a taking a wobbly turn as a socialite in Frank Capra's Platinum Blonde, Hollywood film-makers discovered that Jean Harlow's metier was comedy in 1932's Red-headed Woman. The first half of "Hold Your Man" (directed by Sam "grind 'em out" Wood) seems to have learned the lesson.

As in her other 1932 breakthrough role in "Red Dust" (which, even more so, contained a breakthrough role for Gable, who had been playing pretty nasty gangsters), Harlow begins the movie bathing. This time she is in a tub rather than a barrel (as in "Red Dust"), but is again trading barbs with Clark Gable. Gable is playing Eddie, a small-time con man, who is fleeing the police when he barges into the apartment of Ruby Adams (Harlow). She decides to cover for him (and Eddie undertakes a disguise that should be experienced rather than described).

The photos of men in her apartment show Eddie that she has been around the block a few times, and, since the movie was made before enforcement of the Production Code,* it was possible to show that he clearly spends the night with her. The two hardened-by-experience people fall for each other against their better judgments. Ruby tells Eddie that even his very toothy smile is crooked. Bemused, Eddie exclaims that she thinks she has all the answers. Armed by Anita Loos (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) with comeback, Ruby rolls her head and laconically replies, "Yeah [beat]: to all the dumb questions." She has a respectable suitor (Stuart Erwin), but succumbs to the dangerous magnetism of Eddie.

Unfortunately, the plot gets complicated and a misunderstanding leads to Eddie unintentionally killing a man. Eddie and Ruby take out a marriage license, but before they can wed he goes on the lam, and (clutching the license) Ruby goes to prison, where she finds Eddie's previous moll Gypsy (Dorothy Burgess), whom she earlier knocked out with an impressive left hook. The other cellmates, one of them black (Theresa Harris), adore Ruby.

In a way, it's as if the first (wisecracking) half is pre-Code second (prison) half is drowned by the Code (or by Louis B. Mayer's insistence on replacing fun with moralistic uplift). Devotion triumphs, "debts to society" are paid in full (and then some in the case of the "fallen" woman), and, eventually, there is a quite ridiculously obstructed marriage. What is interesting in the melodramatic and saccharine second half is that it contains an early portrayal of a black professional (the black physician in John Ford's adaptation of Arrowsmith was on a Caribbean island, not in the USA) by Charles Sellon.

On screen, Harlow was usually more than blonde. She generally played socially ambitious beauties from the wrong side of the tracks, but her characters were generally cunning, not stereotypical "dumb blondes." Before dying at age 26, Harlow showed she could play a woman whose career location was not the bedroom (Wife vs. Secretary), but the salvation provided by imprisonment in "Hold" is beyond my ability to suspend disbelief. And the less said about Harlow's singing the better.

Her most memorable roles (in "Dinner at Eight" and "Bombshell") were in the immediate future (which is good, since the future Harlow had was very short!), but the first half of "Hold Your Man" is very entertaining. The droll Garry Owen, as Eddie's partner "Slim," deserves mention/appreciation. Gable's comic timing was about to be made central in 1934's Oscar-sweeping "It Happened One Night," directed by Frank Capra.

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For other Lean & Mean III entries, see/http://www.epinions.com/content_4149256324.

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*On the sexual freedom portrayed before mid-1934 and the moralism forced on Hollywood movies thereafter, see Mick LaSalle's Complicated Women (which I reviewed at http://www.epinions.com/content_98511457924>).




Recommended:
Yes