I have a problem with Clark Gable. Never liked him. I learned to appreciate his comic thing of the Thirties, but I never really liked it. Honky Tonk was conceived as a Clark- Gable-Comedy-After-Gone-With-The-Wind. By this time Gable was so much “Clark Gable” that the scales were ready to moult.
The real star of the film is Lana Turner, Gable’s love-interest, and in real time about half his age. Thereby hangs a tawdry little tale.
The film is, I gather, a favorite. It’s a comedy-western not totally unlike Destry Rides Again, but more vacant, more commercial. Gable plays a player equally adept at cards, real estate deals, and local politics. He hooks up with Boston-identified but drop-dead gorgeous bonfire-grade Lana Turner. There’s some intrigue about phallic power status in the town, and a pretzel-logic marriage-trap, none of which matters because everyone watching the silver screen is distracted by the close ups and two-shots of The Lana and The Gable.
In an earlier post about Café Metropole, I suggested that sometimes the beauty of the actors puts speed bumps against the comedy, because the audience feels more awe at their glamour than comic distance. Honky Tonk is an example of what happens when the producers decide that the glamour is the point of the whole thing, and the story just a coat rack for it. But y’all better get it right then.
The film was directed by Jack Conway, not an unjustly neglected genius by any means, but he did make one of the greatest comedies of the time, Libeled Lady. Much more interesting is that there were two famous cameramen involved: Harold Rosson and William Daniels. These were two of the most admired cinematographers of the time; and the first task of the camera-and-lighting crew was to make the stars look marvelous. And Lana Turner in this film is show-stopping. (The camera likes her, don’t you think?) Daniels, let’s note, was Garbo’s preferred…no, let’s say compulsory cameraman. And here he’s working on Lana Tuner.
Whether the too much beauty thing was a problem in Café Metropole for other people, I don’t know. In that film there were so many strong supporting characters that the beauty of Tyrone Power and Loretta Young was just an interlude. In Honky Tonk, though, the supporting characters don’t get much screen time. And if one is going to focus on the stars’ glamour, shouldn’t the stars have the same kind of shine? Half of Honky Tonk seems to be made up of close ups — it’s not, but the contrast between romantic close-ups and distancing comic medium shots is striking. Gable’s don’t quite align with Turner’s. He looms. She glows. Most films with such radiant female stars reduce their male co-stars in order to show the power of that radiance. But Honky Tonk pretends that Gable is irreducible. As I’ve said, I’ve never liked Gable. He always seems smugly self-confident in a cartoonish way. Most comic actors of the time showed visible pleasure playing with their heroines. They played with them. But Gable always seems to be playing at them. Most of the hunky male comedy stars of the time looked marvelous, but they also had weak spots that made them look ridiculous. Joel McRea, Gary Cooper, William Powell, even Tyrone Power all underplayed their characters. But Gable is never weak. Sometimes, you’d think, this macho posturing should come in for comic puncturing, but it doesn’t, so a bully gets to be the hero. But what do I know? It’s said that Gable was one of the great erotic players in Hollywood, and with all that, never an aggressor. For many years it was rumored that Turner and Gable were secret lovers — denied by Turner in her memoirs, but… Whatever. It’s fascinating to watch the chemistry between the smug, smirking, posturing middle-aged Gable and the barely twenty-year old Turner who was — so the lore has it — moving 90 miles an hour in her career.
Honky Tonk is a prime example of a comedy that was written with the stars so much in mind that it no longer cared about the comedy.