The Mad Miss Manton is one of the dozens of comedy-whodunits made in the 1930s following the success of The Thin Man. Although you rarely hear it mentioned as a classic of the period, it’s always praised as one of the funnier films. It stars Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda three years before their collaboration in The Lady Eve, so commentators tend to see it through that lens. Leigh Jason, its director, has no major successes on his resumé, so he rarely gets mentioned in Hollywood film histories. As I was watching it for the first time I realized I had allowed all those things to prejudice my expectations. Add to this that for all my admiration for Stanwyck, I tend to hesitate to watch any of her comedies that are new to me. Her Ball of Fire is one of my favorites, and The Lady Eve is one of the great works of comic art. But for every beauty there are a load of stinkers: Remember the Night, Christmas in Connecticut, The Bride Walks Out, You Belong to Me, The Bride Wore Boots. And more.
But The Mad Miss Manton really is funny and well-done, with a crackling script by Philip Epstein, and it deserves a better fate. Here’s the basic situation: a rich young woman of skyscraper high society, Melsa Manton (Stanwyck), lives unmarried in an enormous penthouse with her live-in Black maid Hilda (Hattie McDaniel). She is also the chieftain of a gang of similarly rich, fashionable, ermine-clad adult debs who hang out at her apartment (having no need or desire for jobs) and occasionally troop out with Melsa on her urbane adventures. Late one night Melsa, out walking her three enormous English sheepdogs on the deserted city streets, espies suspicious activity in a nearby building. Fearless (her main attribute), she enters the building and finds a murdered corpse. But after she alerts the cops and returns with them to the scene of the crime, the body has vanished. The police, headed by Lieutenant Brent (in a great performance by Sam Levene), are convinced Melsa is either punking them (as indolent high society dames are wont to do), or she is half-crazy (hence the “mad” in Mad Miss Manton). She already has a reputation for self-indulgent antics, even though she is also one of those heiresses (we infer) upon whom many charities depend. The story gets to the papers, and reporter Peter Ames (Fonda) writes a sarcastic item about it, venting his irritation with “Miss Manton and her ilk” who “continue on their million-dollar ermine-lined way” as the country struggles with the Depression. Said Miss Manton storms into Ames’s office to demand satisfaction. (The slap circuit is beautiful.)
I’m not going to spend much time with the plot. Like most of the detective comedies, the crime plot is a distraction from the real fun. Let’s just say it’s tangled. So on with the fun: Melsa is determined to get to the bottom of the mystery. She thinks she knows people who are implicated, and she’s disgusted with the cops and reporters like Ames. She gathers her Junior League Gang to lead them on a hunt for clues at the crime scene. In a fine set-up, she establishes her bona fides as a leader of spunky women who don’t need men. This scene has my favorite line in the movie. As a young Western Union boy delivers messages from Ames, Hilda gently turns him toward the door with the words, “Okay, chile. You’d think they’d send an older man up to this here apartment.” Then Peter Ames appears on the scene to persuade Melsa to drop a libel lawsuit, and we get the first real clue about what will be the central “problem” of the comedy. These women seem to have all the comic phallic power. They don’t needs cops to do their detecting. They don’t seem to need men to support them materially. They are contented with each other’s company, and except for one of them (Jane), they don’t miss male attention. It’s evident that a lot of their power and confidence comes from their wealth and social influence, but they’ve got jam in their own right. The male characters are constantly a step behind and unable to assert their authority. The women are screwball Bacchae. And not only the debs — Hilda has her standards, too. No pipsqueaks for her.
Off the girls go to detect, and the bright comic social lighting cuts to the stark nighttime chiaroscuro of deep noir. I really have a lot to learn about the genre aesthetics of this period. I’ve felt the kinship of screwball comedy and noir for a long time, based mainly on their shared love of wisecracking discourse and amoral affects. But now it’s getting obvious that many of the period comedies also absorbed the aesthetics of other genres simply because comedy can turn anything comic. Take the phallus game in film noir, with its struggles over strength and weakness, placidity and bullying, struggles about asserting and keeping masculinity, so often threatened by phallus-endangering and appropriating women. That’s a lot for the Comic Spirit to have fun with. After all, no one has a right to the comic phallus. When the girls enter what is basically a haunted house, all the clichés of horror and noir get to play.
This is sure-handed noir directing and camera. It’s no surprise that the cinematographer was Nicholas Musuraca, who later filmed Out of the Past. Throughout The Mad Miss Manton the visuals are arrestingly elegant — usually on the noir side.
These glamorously dark images are basically just allusions, though. Despite them and the suspenseful music in several scenes, we know we are watching a snappy comedy and our heroines are in no real danger. Besides, Melsa is indomitable. Stanwyck’s comic characters are pretty similar. They may be startled, but they are rarely truly afraid. When they are bullied, their space invaded by threatening men, comic Stanwyck rarely gives ground. She doesn’t often fight, but her restraint can be unnerving. She scopes and then she calculates. And she never gives up. Peter gradually finds that he’s irresistibly attracted to all this, even though loving her goes against all his proud masculine revulsion at the parasitic upper classes. Nonetheless, he makes the switch from class scold to ardent admirer real fast — and is completely ok with the prospect of living on her wealth. (Nick Charles was fine with that, too.) He’s determined to match her determination one for one — he makes the masculine decision that she’s going to marry him.
I’m often of two minds about Fonda. Sometimes I think he underplays his roles too much, at other times I think he’s incredibly subtle. Given his track record as the noble speechifier in social justice films, it’s sometimes hard for me to figure out how he’s approaching his comic roles. In The Lady Eve, his signature role, he’s so consistently a fool that I don’t really get what Jean sees in him. But in Mad Miss Manton he’s beautifully free. I think this is my favorite of his comic roles. Peter Ames is handsome, attentive, witty, and manly. He just can’t keep hold of the comic phallus. In this scene, once again the gang of “dressmakers’ dummies” bind him, gag him, and for good measure steal his trousers, leaving him in a girly bed in the company of child’s doll. No question who’s got the phallus now.
What romance there has been up to this point has been pretty slapstick, but at midpoint the film delivers a scene that transcends the fun. It’s as velvety a romantic setting as you’ll ever see in a comedy, full of night shades, and yet without any somber tones. The previously ostentatious noir elements have been transformed. Fonda’s filmed as if he were Tyrone Power, and it works. (Honest question: does it make any sense to smoke a cigarette with a blindfold on? When I smoked, I think it was just to see the smoke.)
Melsa can’t resist such an admirer, but she still resists dishing up all the information to Peter and Lieutenant Brent that she has about the murder case (which has acquired additional victims). She’s under threat from the murderer herself. Peter takes a bullet intended for her and lands in the hospital, where he and Brent devise a plan to extract the missing info from her by playing on her feelings for Peter, pretending he’s on his death bed. It’s a hilarious scene. Fonda and Levene ham it up, and Stanwyck reaches into her melodrama thespian bag.
That is, until she puts two and two together.
It all works out in the end, of course. Case solved, love triumphs.
Mad Miss Manton is a lumpy film. It takes a lot of interesting risks while staying within the lines of the thriller comedy. In its pastiche of visual and genre styles, the distinct parts don’t coalesce very smoothly, but each generic tranche has beauties of its own. Its screwball pedigree is strong. Fonda getting ganged up on by fashionable dames, bound, gagged, de-pantsed, shot by mistake, doused with distilled water by Hilda, and having his telephone literally cut off, makes him a bona fide screwball schlimazel. As in The Lady Eve, he gets to be a smooth romantic for a moment, but unlike his character in that film he gets a chance to be a trickster, too — well, at least he tries to be. But in the phallic game he’s no match for a gang of beautiful, well-appointed women. The romantic moments are gorgeous. The class-conflict comedy that we’re promised in the beginning takes unexpected and original turns. The gangster-like runaround with Runyonesque cops works. The psycho-thriller part, with its Hitchcock inflections, are too intense for this kind of comedy in my view, but they are immersive on their own. Maybe the movie is best seen the second time through when one doesn’t have to pay attention to the plot or narrative coherence any more.
A last note: Sam Levene is terrific in this film. He played a lot of hard-boiled gangsters and cops in his career, but you can see why he was chosen to be the perfect Nathan Detroit in the Broadway production of Guys and Dolls. What a pity he didn’t get the part in the film version. I found a taste of it on the Internets.
