Wife vs. Secretary was another experiment in combining comedy and melodrama, but with far more success than most of the others. The melodrama is managed with a light touch and elegance; so is the comedy. The core value of elegance is simplicity, and few films of the time can match Wife vs. Secretary for simplicity.
The lurid title seems to promise a dowdy jealous wife, a scheming hot secretary, a tawdry cat fight, and — given that its male star star is Clark Gable, not William Powell — a smirking, vaunting macho male enjoying the feminine competition for patriarchal benefits. It’s not that. Here’s the simple story: Van Stanhope (what a name!) (Gable) and his wife, Linda Stanhope (Myrna Loy), are happily, sexily married. They surpass their models, Nick and Nora Charles of The Thin Man made two years earlier, by being serious, grounded, only occasionally soused, and living well among the business patricians of New York. (Loy of course played Nora in The Thin Man, and William Powell, who played Nick, was the studio’s original choice to play Van — he was unavailable, so Gable got the part at Loy’s suggestion.) It’s obvious to everyone how much they care for each other. Van is the wealthy publisher of a glossy Cosmopolitan-like magazine, who, facing serious competition from the pulps, decides to buy out his chief pulp competitor in the friendliest buyout ever — but he has to keep it secret until the deal is finalized for business reasons.
Van’s secretary, Whitey (Jean Harlow), is the perfect executive secretary. She loves her job, she admires her boss, and she’s pretty much executive material herself. (It’s important to the tone of the film that Whitey never aspires to anything greater than her job, even though some comedies by this point had placed beautiful women in executive positions.) Her admiration for Van tips over into adoration, but she restrains her emotions out of respect for him and his obviously happy marriage. Whitey is meanwhile being courted by a young Jimmy Stewart, who is more appropriate for her class, but basically a sweet, conservative, imagination-free bore. Van relies so much on Whitey’s assistance that he involves her in the business intrigue, while swearing her to secrecy even from Linda.
This innocent conspiracy (innocent if you’re a capitalist movershaker) leads to erotic misunderstandings. Van’s devices — which he considers entirely professional — lead to gossip and envy among the society chorus, which eventually reach Linda. Van is a pretty simple character, a sort of Don Draper from Mad Men without the baggage; he doesn’t even imagine that his overtime sessions with Whitey might cause tongues to wag. But he is not so simple that he doesn’t begin to feel Whitey’s attraction — and this is one of the elegant beauties of the film. Van is truly happy with his wife and he doesn’t have a roving eye. But he would be as thick as a fence post if he did not respond to Whitey’s devotion and — did I mention she’s played by Harlow? — her physical charms. And that goes for Loy’s and Harlow’s characters, too. They each have only one dominant character trait, and it’s a good one: Van’s energy, Linda’s trust, and Whitey’s admiration. Each character thinks only the best of the others. The complications come from their one related subsidiary counter-trait: Van’s inattentiveness, Linda’s passiveness, and Whitey’s romantic longing. The obstacles are set up by the bystanding social chorus, not by the protagonists themselves. As for plot, the misprized circumstantial evidence that Van is having an affair with Whitey mounts until Linda feels she has no alternative but to leave him. He’ll be happier with Whitey. Whitey confronts Linda to air the truth — there was no affair, but if Linda leaves Van, Whitey will gladly take her place, even though she knows that she can’t make Van as happy as Linda did. Truth revealed, husband and wife are reconciled, and Whitey and Jimmy Stewart set out on their class-appropriate life as a couple.
This is pretty noble stuff for comedy. In their careers Gable and Harlow often play things broad, but here they are impressively restrained. All three of the leads were clearly cast against type — Gable is not a rake, but a loving husband and serious businessman; Harlow is not a vamp, but a chaste professional and a modest romantic; and Loy is not the buttoned-up sidekick, but a gorgeous, sexy dame. There is some witty dialogue, a few moments of not-too-vulgar slapstick, but this is no laff riot. Comedy doesn’t have to be sidesplitting, of course. Molière wrote masterpieces that never elicit more than a smile from the audience. Unlike a Lubitsch comedy — which the film sometimes resembles visually — there’s no conspiratorial winking to the audience, no rakishness. There’s even a moment when the film seems to allude to its kinship with Lubitsch, and its difference. Early in the story, we see Van playfully calling Linda out from her bedroom (they each have their own bedrooms, and apparently visit them as if they were tryst havens) for breakfast. Where the closed door for Lubitsch is iconic for knowing seduction, often adulterous, here the closed door is a sign of connubial bliss. Instead of closing discreetly to hide the romantic shenanigans about to unfold, here the door opens after what was clearly a night of marital pleasure.
MGM meant for Wife vs. Secretary to be a “serious” comedy. They assigned it to Clarence Brown, a director who made very few comedies and is better know as a romantic stylist given to big gestures, emotions, and scenes. The camera is by Ray June, the man most responsible for what is sometimes called the “velvet” richness of MGM films of the period. And the script was the result of a fascinating collaboration. Norman Krasna and John Lee Mahin, two fine screenwriters, wrote the main play, after a Faith Baldwin story in Cosmopolitan. Also listed in the script credits is Alice Duer Miller. That’s pretty surprising. Miller was a member of the Algonquin Circle, a suffragette poet, and a popular writer of romantic, woman-friendly novels. I haven’t been able to find any information about her role in the script writing, but it seems like an important thing to research.
Throughout the film, the moments of greatest tension, the ones that could break either toward comedy or toward melodrama, are kept tense. The audience knows, of course, that they have bought tickets to a comedy, but they may have been tricked. I particularly like the scene when Van whisks Whitey away to dance. The chorus disapproves — but then they disapproved on Anna and Vronsky, too.
I’ve written before about comedies that try to balance humor with melodrama. Most of the time I don’t like the product — maybe because the film-makers don’t have a good feeling for how they can be related to each other; that is, other than the fact that any melodrama can be played for laughs if the audience sees it from a sufficient distance, and any comedy can be a tragedy if you use enough close ups. Wife vs. Secretary feels to me like it’s drawing on an almost pre-modern, courtly idea of romantic comedy. The emotions are all noble, the women are all willing to sacrifice what they love, and the men are squeezed between their oaths and their longings. All very noble, very Princess of Cleves. (That said, the social situation is definitely not pre-modern. Only in 20th century America does the predicament of a professional female executive secretary make sense.) The richest scene emotionally captures it. After a tough late-night negotiation session that included manly business drinking, Whitey escorts a tipsy Van back to his room. Many commentators have lamented Harlow’s young death just a year after this scene was shot; she had great gifts and possibilities.
I’ve said that I don’t care from Clark Gable much. But in this film he’s helped to be subtle. It’s said that he had deep, warm, non-erotic relationships with both Harlow and Loy, and that may be the reason there’s none of the usual Clark Gable posturing and mugging. I’ve also opined that on-screen beauty can be harmful to comedy because it draws the audience in instead of distancing it. In Wife vs. Secretary, though, it seems to work. Maybe it’s because the comedy is so restrained and high-class. Maybe it’s because the direction, lighting, and camera are particularly skillful. Maybe it’s because everyone is playing against type, so the story can’t be ignored. Maybe it’s because the plot is so simple, logical, and grounded that we have room to spare for wonder. But beauty is definitely as important as laughs.
And my favorite, a shot that Avedon would have been proud of:
Their memoirs all attest that none of the people who made the film cared for it much. Clarence Brown couldn’t wait to be done with it. Gable, Harlow, and Loy all thought it was tepid. (Loy was generally the most positive, but she hated the bracelet in the trout scene — the very scene that proved to be most memorable and popular with audiences.) The New York critics panned it. Apparently, they yawned a lot. But what do they know? It was very popular with non-NYC audiences and made a lot of money. Film historians think it’s because any film with those stars would have been popular. OK. Probably. But from my vantage point, it’s enduring (I’ve put it in the “Expanded Canon”) because of its superior elegance. Hollywood wasn’t good at that, but this one was good — even if the people making it didn’t think it worked.