Libeled Lady hits the sweetest spot of Hollywood comedies of the interwar era. It’s a transcendent example of the genre, a fusion of literate script, sharp-witted dialogue, brilliant acting, pacing, mise-en-scène, and all the screwball virtues: quick-reacting women, overconfident men with absurd plans, rapid-fire repartee and pratfalls, newsroom machismo and high-society suavité. It’s miraculous, actually, since on paper there would have been no reason to expect it. Neither Myrna Loy nor William Powell made many films with the great comic auteurs of the time, Ernst Lubitsch, Howard Hawks, or Preston Sturges. Loy did work with Frank Capra on one of his minor films, Broadway Bill, and Powell made My Man Godfrey with Gregory LaCava, but the ten comedies Loy and Powell made together were all with MGM’s contract directors famous for their throughput speed, low budgets, and lack of personal style. Jack Conway, Libeled Lady‘s director, was one of these men. The screenwriters were also fairly undistinguished company scribes; they weren’t hacks, but neither Howard Emmett Rogers nor Maureen Watkins have particularly distinguished filmographies. (Watkins wrote the play Chicago in the Twenties, but that one success was far behind her.) George Oppenheimer is the only major name in the writing credits, and he appears to have been merely the gag man. The cinematographer, Norbert Brodine, was, like Conway, an efficient company employee without any artistic aspirations. Looking at this manifest, it’s safe to assume that the studio expected to turn out another star-driven but unambitious entertainment like The Thin Man, relying on the box-office magnetism of the Powell-Loy-Jean Harlow-Spencer Tracy supergroup. And yet, it’s a masterpiece. It’s as if it was made by the moment itself, maybe even by accident — right place, right time, the stars in epochal alignment. It doesn’t have the signature style of any of the major directors or studios; it doesn’t even have the distinctive look of its own studio, MGM. And yet there are elements of all of them, even of the boy wonder, Sturges, who had yet to direct his first film. (There are prefigurations of The Lady Eve all over Libeled Lady.) There is one thing, though, that’s distinctive about it and characteristic of the MGM culture that made it: the onscreen chemistry of four Olympian movie stars at the peak of their talent. The film was crafted for them and they went to town. They were acting for each other.
For the record, I think Libeled Lady is one of the very few perfect comedies of period. Other films may be more original, braver, more ecstatic, and more artistically ambitious — and because of that they occasionally had rough edges and downtimes when their experiments fizzled, their pacing wandered, or their sense of audience got confused. Libeled Lady has no downtimes, no rough edges, no missed steps. It has the best comic performances by Powell and Loy in their storied careers — far better than the schticky The Thin Man and its increasingly pathetic sequels. I’m not familiar with many of Brodine’s films, which were basically B-pictures, but in Libeled Lady the camera sometimes looks like it was directed by William Daniels. Conway may have been a speed merchant, but here he’s at one with the breakneck speed of the plot and dialogue. The clichés of screwball romance are so abundant it could have become a paint-by-the-numbers affair, but to me it feels as if the formulas arrived where they were always headed. I just wrote that Oppenheimer was “merely” the gag writer, but the gags — verbal and physical — come so thick and fast, from a wisecrack to a covering metaphor, that they’re like the bricks from which the whole film is built. It’s an enclosed comic world where the humor and comic feeling is positively fractal; the structure is mirrored in the comebacks, and the quips support the edifice. Probably, the lack of ambition and ego involved in the film is why it was so successful — the formulas transcend themselves by just being completely themselves among each other. The film is both totally classical and totally modern.
Libeled Lady is a foursome comedy, maybe the best one produced by the Hollywood of its time. The comic complications of two distinct but connected couples has been one of the core designs in the history of romantic comedy. Two couples that are usually separated by class begin as parallel plots — the more proletarian pair are usually inversions or parodies of the more patrician pair — until one of the characters crosses over the gap, disrupting the equilibrium. This might happen by accident, as in The Comedy of Errors, or by nefarious design, as in The Marriage of Figaro, or by romantic enchantment, as in Midsummer Night’s Dream. Things are usually sorted out at the end in a way that restores the class equilibrium, while retaining some of the thrill of erotic transgression avoided in the nick of time. Historically, this romantic four-body problem tends to reduce to a three-body one, with one of the partners excluded from the main intrigue.
The plot of Libeled Lady is a thing of beauty. The main plot is a constantly shifting maze of delirious logical complications based on each character’s micro-plots, subterfuges, shifting desires, and miscalculations. Here’s the jist. (Warning, if you already know the story, you might want to skip the summary below. Farce loves complicated plots, especially self-complicating ones. Libeled Lady‘s is certainly one of those.)
Warren Haggerty (Tracy), managing editor of the tabloid New York Evening Star, faces a crisis: the paper is hit with a ruinous $5 million libel suit by the magnate Jim Allenbury (Walter Connolly) for printing a story falsely accusing his daughter Connie (Loy) of having broken up a society marriage. At the same time, Haggerty’s long-suffering fiancée Gladys (Harlow) appears in the newsroom in her wedding gown, furious that Walter is late for their wedding, as he has been many times before, always using some sensational news assignment as an excuse to postpone it.
Warren has a bright, desperate idea to save the paper: he will hire the crafty Bill Chandler (Powell), who was once a star fixer of libel cases for the paper until Warren fired him for competing with him to be the paper’s alpha-male. When he is finally located after considerable difficulty, the tricksy Chandler accepts the job on his own terms and proposes a plan of action that he’s had success with in the past: the irresistible ladies’ man Chandler will romance Connie and have his wife discover the two of them in a compromising clinch; to avoid scandal, the Allenburys will certainly drop their suit. One problem: Chandler’s not married.
Warren persuades poor frustrated, romance-mag reading Gladys to marry Chandler (whom she detests as an arrogant creep) as a temp-wife.
Chandler then books passage on the luxury liner on which Connie and her father are returning to New York from England, where he sets out to charm the presumably stuck-up millionairess. Things do not go as planned. When Connie appears — gorgeous, elegant, aloof — she is more than a match for him. She has no interest in him, sees through his amorous devices, and suspects that he is playing her, as most men do. Chandler has to change tactics and try to get to Connie through her tycoon father. Learning that he is an avid fly-fisherman, Chandler reads everything in the ship’s library on the subject and pretends to be one himself. It works, and he’s invited to the Allenbury mountain cabin to fish their trout stream. (Comic metaphor check: unable to net Connie directly, he develops an angle. Literally. He pretends to be an angler. Her father is caught, but Connie sees through that, too. She sees the metaphorical angler behind the faux literal one.)
A classic skirmish of the sexes ensues, as Chandler repeatedly tries to angle Connie into his plot, and she repeatedly turns the verbal and situational tables on him. It’s one the beauties of the film that the smooth operator Chandler, who begins with zero respect for women and the rich, finds his male self-respect bruised so often by Connie’s nearly effortless one-upmanship that his original professional goal — to frame the presumptively heedless rich bitch — morphs into proving himself to be at least her equal. Rather than charming her, he deliberately offends her.
Connie’s father continues to believe him and takes him trout fishing on his Catskills estate. Connie remains suspicious — until we witness one of the great slapstick moments of the talking comedies, as Chandler takes pratfall after pratfall in the swift mountain brook, eventually catching the most celebrated fish of the region by accident. It’s an epic scene worthy of Buster Keaton, probably Powell’s signature moment of physical comedy.
Connie is impressed. She warms to Chandler, thinking she has misjudged him. And he naturally warms to her, too. They spend a romantic evening on Connie’s moonlit private lake — the very evening for which the in flagrante frame-up was scheduled. It’s a major kink in the plan. He has to sabotage the plot without letting Warren, Gladys, and the paper in on it (not to mention Connie herself).
He rushes out to intercept his co-conspirators, who have driven up from the city to consummate the plot; he tells them Connie has flown the coop. Plan aborted — which also means his temporary marriage to Gladys has to be extended.
Naturally, things get even more complicated. Thinking that Chandler has simply been spurned by Connie, Warren seizes the initiative to visit Connie himself at her palatial home to play on her social-conscience heartstrings: she should give up the libel suit to protect the jobs of the paper’s workers. Backfire: Connie is persuaded alright, but to the notion that the socially responsible path is to use the $5 million from the suit to create a fund for the unemployed workers. Suddenly, who should appear but Chandler, poshly attired and quite at home. He’s stunned to see Warren. Warren, too, is stunned but quickly puts the pieces together: Chandler has been secretly spending his days with Connie without revealing his relationship with the paper or with Gladys (let alone the frame-up plot itself). Warren realizes that Chandler has been deceiving everyone — and the plot is now out of Chandler’s hands and can continue, only now without Chandler’s permission.
Things should be coming to a head, but the zigzags keep coming. While Chandler and Gladys were going through the motions of their fake marriage in a ritzy hotel suite, Gladys became enamored with what she perceives as Chandler’s gallantry. Used to being hit on constantly (did I mention she’s played by Harlow?), and an avid reader of pulp romance magazines, Gladys swoons over what is in fact Chandler’s indifferent gentlemanly courtesy to her. When she discovers that Chandler has been keeping his liaison with Connie a secret, she’s ready to blow (as only Harlow could do). She decides she will kink the plan herself, and refuse to renounce her marriage to Chandler. She drives to Connie’s estate to make her demands in the middle of a fashionable party. Connie, getting wind of the rumors about Gladys’s claims, decides to cut the Gordian Knot and force the issue — she proposes to Chandler in a lovely romantic scene, asking him point blank whether he has ever been married. He denies it, and it’s a bit of a head-scratcher for the audience — it’s not until the final scene that we learn that Gladys’s Yucatan divorce from a previous marriage had been invalidated, meaning that her trick-marriage to Chandler is also invalid. Supposedly. Chandler accepts Connie’s proposal, and they are married that night by a village Justice of the Peace rousted out of bed. (Someone ought to do a mashup of these midnight marriages in Hollywood films — my favorites are in The Moon is Our Home and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek.)
It doesn’t end there. Warren, unaware that Connie and Chandler are now hitched, arranges for Gladys to learn that Connie and Chandler are staying in a suite together at the Grand Plaza. She storms in on them to claim Chandler. Warren follows close behind to witness the long longed-for scandalous confrontation. Connie and Chandler hear her out calmly but events are coming to a head. Chandler brings up Gladys’s incomplete divorce. Gladys has her own trump card — she had procured a second divorce, which is still valid. So she’s not a bigamist and she’s still Chandler’s wife. (Stanley Cavell wrote a book on Hollywood comedies of remarriage; someone should write one on the re-divorces.)
One thing leads to another. The boys end up having a fist fight, bloodying each other’s noses. Connie, ever graceful and composed, speaks to Gladys woman to woman, and reminds her that it’s Warren she loves, not Chandler, that she simply was swept away by the experience of being close to a man who talked with and listened to her. The social order is restored. Gladys and Warren are reconciled in their tough, fast lower world, while Connie and Chandler, still in their class-appropriate evening dress, have firmed up the upper world. Connie has learned that there is value in Chandler’s social flexibility, and thereby shows a new flexibility herself; Chandler is allowed to cultivate his best tendencies toward gallantry and fine haberdashery, and not incidentally to secure his livelihood, marrying into Connie’s wealth and status. That’s amore. (It’s interesting how many comedies of the era adopt a similar pattern, first emphasized in The Thin Man‘s Nick and Nora, of the manly male being completely comfortable marrying up into a woman’s wealth and higher status. The Mad Miss Manton parodies it hilariously, without actually dismissing it.)
Despite all the complications and kinks, and the velocity of the patter, it all unfolds with dizzying smoothness and logic because the characters are beautifully and consistently drawn. Arguably, the great script and performances are responsible for all that. But the studio, and director Conway, had another artistic problem, and probably a more concerning one for them since it was a distinctively Hollywood problem: how do you construct a film comedy that gives four major movie stars an equal amount of screen time? That may not seem like an aesthetic problem at first, but how it’s resolved (and it must be resolved because the stars’ careers depend on screen time) involves everything: dialogue, editing, mise-en-scène, lighting, all the way down to blocking. How do you solve a four-body problem in a movie? The result in Libeled Lady is remarkable: four equally important characters distributed throughout the movie’s matrix. Inside the vortex of the overarching plot, each character has their own mini-vortices — secrets and microplans which they share with one other character, or at most with two others. That means that each character has to be shown in one-to-one relations to the other three individually, and also within ensembles with two others. (The big resolve that involves all four has to be delayed until the last scene.) Feydeau spoke of the algebra of farce, but on this scale it’s set-theory. Here’s the evidence:
Four characters, six groups of two, three groups of three — there’s rarely been a more logical use of two- and three-shots.
One thing I find interesting in this framing strategy — which is a constraint forced on the director by the casting as much as the story — is that the film has relatively few of the beautiful, contemplative glamor close-ups and one-shots for which MGM was famous, and were specialties of the studio’s great cameramen like William Daniels, Ray June, and Harold Rosson. Here are a few luscious ones.
I haven’t included any of the fourth star, Spencer Tracy. Ok, here’s one. It’s not a repose-shot. There simply aren’t any of those.
And that leads to a fascinating aspect of Libeled Lady — there’s almost no downtime in it. All the characters are either talking with each other or on the phone to each other. Myrna Loy gets almost all the glamor shots and close-ups. Connie is the only character of the four who does not initiate some action or another (except for one, the most important initiation of them all, her proposal to Chandler). Connie remains still as the vortex swirls around her. Harlow, perhaps surprisingly, gets only the one close-up I included above, when she’s left alone for a few seconds to savor her new attraction to Chandler. That comports with the kinetics of the script. All the principals are constantly in conversation and the film exploits Tracy’s and Harlow’s prodigious talent to talk blue-streaks. Like most newsroom comedies of the time, the characters live in the medium of language like fish live in water. Only Connie, cool, observant, unflappable, has moments of quiet. But even that ends, as it must, with her marriage and new friendships, and she, too, joins the noisy attempt at the conclusion to explain to her father what exactly has been going on, eliciting the final demanding word of the movie: “Quiet!”