Nothing Sacred is very funny and true to its title, very irreverent. It’s a core film in the screwball canon. It’s one of Carole Lombard’s showcase comedies, and the script, credited to Ben Hecht, is crazy witty. For all that, I’m not crazy about it. There are strange things going on that put me off — though it’s growing on me.
The plot really is a thing of beauty in its simplicity and audaciousness. New York City news reporter (it’s a Ben Hecht script, so of course a newspaperman) Wally Cook (Fredric March) is trying to keep his job after pumping up a hoax story that he bought into when he really should have known better. He gets wind that a young woman in a small town in Vermont is dying of radium poisoning and devises a plan to invite her to the City and have her feted big time to enjoy her final days as a plucky little heroic celebrity — all for the public relations glory of the paper. Cut to Warsaw, Vermont, where Hazel Flagg (Carole Lombard) discovers that she is not in fact about to die. Her lush of a doctor, Doc Downer (Charles Winninger), misdiagnosed her. She’s perfectly healthy. As a result, she can’t get the $200 that the town had allocated to her for her last days, which she had hoped to spend on a trip to New York. As luck would have it, she encounters Wally outside Doc Downer’s office and is inspired by his offer to fund just such a NYC trip to extend the pretense that she truly is mortally ill, without letting Wally in on the con.
So begins the extended goof: Wally and Hazel constantly conversing at cross-purposes. Innocent at first, Hazel just wants her trip to New York, but Wally interprets everything she says in terms of his illusion: the courageous little dying swan. Gradually she gets it — this is a con she can exploit and enjoy. It’s a funny gag in its own right, but it’s raised to delirious intensity by Lombard’s performance as Hazel. She’s a feckless con-artist — she plans nothing, but new extensions of the con keep falling into her lap. She has no second thoughts; the whole thing is a godsend and too much fun to examine. Meanwhile, March’s Wally is so earnest and gullible that he misses every clue thrown his way.
The film was directed by William Wellman, a legendary figure in Hollywood at the time, widely referred to as “Wild Bill” Wellman. I’m not enamored of his style, but it’s evident already in this scene that he has three priorities: make Lombard as beautiful as possible, maintain a pace that will allow the misunderstandings and double-entendres to sink in, and to make the editing amusingly rough enough to be borderline slapstick. The first had priority; Lombard was one of Hollywood’s world-class beauties. Consider some of the posters for the film.
The second, pacing, required art. The third makes the director into a comic actor in his own right. What’s up with Wally’s and Hazel’s dialogue while they are obscured by a tree branch? (There are more shots like this that don’t advance the plot but are very funny.)
I’m sure it’s not without precedent, but I can’t recall another screwball heroine who is simultaneously as delirious and as calculating as Lombard’s Hazel. (Lombard to me is always just a hair’s breadth away from going over the top in almost all her films. It’s the director’s job to keep her contained among the other actors.)
So, Wally flies Hazel and Doc Downer to New York, where the whole city wants a piece of Hazel’s going away party. So, more satirical beauty: plugging into and intensifying Hazel’s personal con, a whole metropolis full of phonies puts on a show of spectacular sympathy. Hazel is in ecstasy — while Wally becomes more and more disgusted with the phonies’ show of care for the poor dying girl.
In a wonderful scene Hazel attends a gigantic cabaret performance where she is the guest of honor. As the m.c. lauds her, the audience descends into comic grief, and, believing her own con, Hazel joins them. It’s all so sad.
It includes one of my favorite throwaway lines in a film full of them.
Wally: For good clean fun, there’s nothing like a wake.
Hazel: Oh please, let’s not talk shop.
One of the things I like most about Nothing Sacred is that the misprisions are relentless — they’re not all extensions of earlier ones, the comic world seems to set them up as a matter of course. Hazel gets plastered at the Casino’s celebration of her and passes out on stage as she revels in her own tragic heroism. The attending admirers believe it’s medical — Hazel coming closer to her sad end. Not.
Complications gather speed. Wally, who has fallen in love with his brave little heroine, has his paper call in the best European experts on radium poisoning; perhaps they can find a cure. Sensing that their gig is up, Hazel and Doc Downer devise a faux suicide by drowning — foiled when Wally comes to the rescue, pulling her out of the river. The European experts find no trace of radium. Wally and his editor are dumbfounded. But Hazel has come up with a new angle: she’s contracted pneumonia from her jump into the river. As she’s about to be examined again, Hazel is about to give herself up, but Wally, now wise to the con, encourages her to keep it going. She needs to have a fever. In one of the best known scenes in the film, Wally concocts a plan to get Hazel’s temperature up by making her box with him.
In the end, the slapstick fight and the two leads delivering their lines through lumps on the jaw is just a goof anyway. Her admirers will not allow her to “flaunt [her] recovery.” A final ruse is devised: Hazel will vanish, leaving yet another tragic farewell note. Her uplifting legend will live on.
What could be wrong with such a giddy, comically cynical movie? Its satire is as omnivorous as anything that Preston Sturges would produce later. The title is apt — nothing is sacred, Hollywood platitudes and formulas above all: weepy melodramas, Yankee “yep-and-nope towns,” the newspaper business, New York celebrity, and Capracorn. (Mr. Deeds Goes to Town was released the previous year.) My reservations aren’t very big. While the script and the basic story idea are generally very funny, their development is lumpy and the pacing inconsistent. It’s as if it was directed by several different people. And no wonder. Besides Hecht himself (he wrote some of the best comedy scripts of the period, including The Front Page, Design for Living, and Tales of Manhattan), some of the uncredited other writers entrusted with punch-up and dialogue were Moss Hart, George S. Kaufmann, Ring Lardner, George Oppenheimer, and Budd Schulberg, all among the Hollywood comedy-screenplay aristocracy. How the tasks were distributed among all those egos would be an interesting thing to research. But the effect is that the wit is sometimes stellar and sometimes slow. Moreover, despite all those witty screen writers and cinematic montages, Nothing Sacred often feels like a transposed stage play. Color is yet another thing. This is one of the first non-musical comedies done in Technicolor. I’m at peace with early Technicolor for musicals (not so much for later, post-World War II emulsions), but for conversational comedies I find it distracting. Many of the indoor sets become epic in scale when the dialogue isn’t, and the night-scenes are very dark indeed, dark as any 40s black and white noir. Wellman does some interesting things to counteract it. One is that idiosyncratic habit of his of placing visual obstacles in the viewer’s way, to heighten the sound of the voices and dampen the visual vividness. In addition to the tree branch I mentioned above, there’s a dialogue between Wally and his editor that has to be conducted around floral obstructed views.
The scene in which Wally and Hazel confess their love to each other immediately after Wally “rescues” Hazel from the river is shot with only their feet in view.
I’ve complained a lot in this blog about the way glamorous faces in close-up can be a different sort of obstruction to comic conversation. When it’s used for magical beauty-effects alone, the viewer’s attention gets soft. If, however, the point is to show how it’s a character’s attention that gets soft, then it has comic uses — as in Marlene Dietrich’s comedies. Lombard’s close-ups in color have a similar effect. But I probably will get used to it. Nothing Sacred is a great comedy — its lumpiness and idiosyncrasies probably help it to be one.