If you’ve never seen Jean Harlow’s Bombshell before, you have to prepare yourself. It’s generally considered one of the great comedies of the 1930s, a surefire member of the Great Comic Canon. But it’s one of the oddest films in there. Imagine screwball marrying a nervous breakdown and having a meta-baby. It’s very funny, but the humor is inconsistent. It was directed and partially written by Victor Fleming, the much-admired director of Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, but cinematically it’s quite uneven, and to my eye shows few signs of movie genius. Visually it oscillates between crude stage blocking that you often see in very early sound film and clever parodistic anticipations of Hollywood mise-en-scène yet to come. The strangest thing about it is that with all its cinematic lumpiness, it’s one of the most “modern,” self-reflexive meta-films the era produced. Its look is old-fashioned even for 1933, but as comedy it’s far ahead of its time. The only film I can compare it to is Sullivan’s Travels.
Its backstory is famous in film history, maybe too famous. It’s loosely based on moments in the career of the great silent film star Clara Bow, who had been one of director Fleming’s old flames, a hard-working actress who was saddled with a dysfunctional, exploitative family and hangers on and an unscrupulous press agent. The plot, such as it is, follows Lola Burns (Harlow), through a number of set-pieces in a compressed year-in-the-life structure. We see her preparing for a day’s shooting, dealing with parasitical relatives, and searching for an identity in a world that consists almost entirely of photoplay fictions. Each of her aspirational attempts collapses, mainly because of the manipulations of her p.r. man, Space Hanlon (Lee Tracy). The plot never really advances. After each adventure Lola ends up where she began, a sexy, rudderless movie star in a tough and ruthless Crazy Town.
This is my favorite of Harlow’s performances, even if it isn’t my favorite of her films. (That would be Libeled Lady.) She’s quite openly playing herself at times, and people who know that can feel discomfited by the subterranean tensions. Compared with her other performances, she’s free and nuanced here. We don’t see comic heroines like her often. She’s a romantic, but her ideas about romance are entirely bound by Hollywood’s cliches — and yet she’s one of stars whose toil creates those illusions. She’d like to be a free spirit, but she has no idea what to do with freedom. But boy does she have energy! — and what’s most important for the film, she can talk a blue streak, which is an important quality when your leading man is Lee Tracy.
I watch this movie as if it were an avant-garde musical in which talk substitutes for music. There’s not much physical flexibility, but the words flow from Harlow and Tracy like an old-school jam session, a tenor and an alto sax taking their turns cutting each other, laying down riffs, and steaming through the changes. It takes a while for Harlow to get going, but that’s part of the story. Throughout, in every new situation, she thinks “something cute is supposed to happen,” only to realize that she has been deceived and exploited. (Haha!) And then she blows.
Bombshell opens with Lola waking from a nice dream into the chaos of her real life.
Tracy’s Space Hanlon is, as usual with Tracy, a hard character to like, and even though he appears at film’s end to be the one Lola was meant to be with, there’s no real romantic sentiment. (That’s a given in Lee Tracy films.) Space is the consummate fast-talking promo man — in much the same vein as he was in The Half Naked Truth, which was released the previous year. By the end, we know that Space has been manipulating Lola’s world in every way, insuring that she’ll always be the subject of good gossip. I don’t like Tracy’s performance here as much as in Half-Naked Truth and Washington Merry-Go-Round, but there’s no denying his virtuosity. He would steal the spotlight if Harlow weren’t also in it. And even though Lola has the gift of gab, too, she’ll never get the last word. Listen to Space’s exposition of the power of a sex star.
There are times when I think the blocking and camera-work lacks imagination. But sometimes it’s just great. In one of my favorite scenes, Lola is on the set (basically the set of Harlow’s previous film, Red Dust) entangled with her dissolute Dickensian dipso-gambler father (Frank Morgan), her sweet-on-her director Jim Brogan (Pat O’Brien), and her would-be continental lover, the Marquis Hugo di Binelli di Pisa (Ivan Lebedeff) — into which verbal brawl Space dives with glee, maneuvering each of the males out of the picture with a dazzling patter of promises and flattery. What I love about this scene is the way Fleming has arrayed the four quarrelers as statically as if they were on a vaudeville stage, until Space intervenes with a torrent of words and smoothly sheepdogs the competing males out of the frame.
Unlike other fast-talking dames played by Barbara Stanwyck or Glenda Farrell, Lola would actually prefer some peace and quiet, but those are things she will never get. Space embodies the incessant noise of the Hollywood Machine, where the only rest comes in sleep — which ended before the action begins. Of the two big talkers in the film Tracy is unquestionably the master, but Harlow shows a strong feel for it. If noise equals Hollywood, we can see why she’ll never get free of it. She likes the banter too much.
In a famous scene Lola goes off on all her tormentors. It feels like it should be a climactic moment, but it actually mirrors her little rant in the film’s opening moments. We’ve been waiting for this moment, but it’s not clear yet whether it will change her relationships or underscore than nothing will change.
Lola breaks with Space and tries to leave the biz, but Space is unstoppable. When she escapes to a hotel in Desert Springs (aka Palm Springs), Space follows her with another plan that will prove to be his pièce de resistance. First, using reverse psychology he re-kindles her interest in being a movie star by stirring up her professional jealousy. He dangles the prospect of her playing the lead in Alice in Wonderland, “the part you ought to play.” Lola bristles when she hears it might be offered to another actress: “Imagine her sitting in that pumpkin with those white mice!” It’s a laugh out loud moment, and pretty cruel, too. It’s now a bit clearer than it was before that Lola isn’t exactly a smart blonde. She seems to have been born and raised in the movies.
The best known scene from the film is justly famous. All the comic levels come together at the meta. Lola is swept off her feet by the elegant, gallant Gifford Middleton (Franchot Tone), the scion of the old-rich “Boston Middletons.” He professes to despise the cheap entertainments of the cinema, and does not recognize that she is a movie star. Finally, she can be loved for who she really is, and by the ideal courtly lover. The scene gets funnier, crueler, and odder the more times you watch the movie. First, it’s high-romantic Hollywood. All of a sudden the cinematography unfolds from utilitarian to swoony. Tone — before he became the embodiment of male smugness — appears to be the man every romantic schoolgirl movie-fan is waiting for. Even what is perhaps the film’s most memorable line — “Your hair is like a field of silver daisies. I’d like to run barefoot through your hair!” — does nothing to thin out Lola’s romantic fog. She responds just like the heroines do in the movies. And that’s exactly the point. Lola wants to be in a movie to escape from her real dysfunctional life, but it’s an act, and she’s not a very good actress. She’s a bombshell.
After proposing to her, Gifford introduces Lola to his stuffy Back Bay parents, who get the vapors when they discover that Lola is in the movies — and meet her lowlife family.
The shock to their respectability is too great. The engagement can’t withstand it.
Cruelly, and hilariously, it turns out that the whole thing is a prank orchestrated by Space, who hired out of work actors to play the whole Middleton crew. It was a phony deal from the start. And by the end of the film, Lola realizes that almost every aspect of her life — the private part, not just the public — has been plotted out by Space. So it’s either horribly or comically fitting that she also realizes that he is the man for her.
Viewing Bombshell naively, with the expectations of a “normal” screwball comedy, the film is rather shocking. Our spunky heroine has been manipulated, abused, exploited, and made a fool of at every turn. She really has nothing of her own but her stardom, and every attempt she makes to find something more fulfilling leads to more fakery. There’s no real romance, or even a happy ending. And our sympathy as viewers seems abused, as well. But viewed from the distance comedy demands, it’s all as logical as an 18th century satirical comedy of manners. Only it’s not happening in genteel society, it’s happening in Hollywood America. Lola is a platinum female Quixote dominated by a Sancho gone P.R. Man. As a comedy, Bombshell is so abstract it’s stunning. Even though Harlow plays herself as a star trapped by her sex appeal, the film is altogether asexual. Tracy never works as a love-interest. He’s a force of nature that can’t submit to anything, not even romance. And Harlow isn’t an irresistible seducer, she’s a complicated, frustrated, neurotic airhead. The film is so asexual that at times I have imagined it performed as high camp, with cross-gender casting in the style of the Ridiculous Theater. Maybe seen that way the coruscating satire and indifference to cheapened ideals would be clearer, as would maybe what I think is the film’s real unconscious theme: in a world dominated by Hollywood illusions, virtuosity beats sentiment any day.