Smart Woman was one of Gregory La Cava’s first soundie comedies, and one of Mary Astor’s very few leading comic roles. Astor was a competent comedienne, but by the time sound was introduced her aura and style were practically fixed in stone: serious, refined, intelligent, ethereally beautiful, and dignified — so dignified that pratfalls were out of the question. She also didn’t seem particularly inclined to accept (or perhaps even to be offered) comic roles. She was thoroughly identified with drama, much like Bette Davis, though I believe she was a much better at comedy than Davis. One of Hollywood’s most radiant young starlets in the silent era, she was initially typecast as the intense, innocent ingenue whose refined features and manners made her heartbreakingly vulnerable.
With sound and the new spicy pre-Code sensibilities, her image was changed. She would rarely be disassociated from high society — a predicament almost forced on her when Warner Brothers renamed her from Lucile Vasconcellos Langhanke to Mary Astor. They could just as well have named her Mary Vanderbilt. By the early ’30s her cascading locks were cut fashionably short, not to flapper style, but that of the no-nonsense modern woman, a look she would rarely change over the years. Even when she was cast against her type, as in her most famous role as Bridgid O’Shaughnessy in Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, she’s pretending to be a society deb. (Fwiw, I think she’s the lone casting mistake in that otherwise beautifully cast movie. They should have made her grow her hair longer.) Astor played a few roles in comedies (notably in the original version of Holiday) that never required her to come down in class. Toward the end of the Thirties and the early Forties, she had important supporting roles in Midnight and The Palm Beach Story and in both she remains true to type. Only in Sturges’s film is she asked to say or do anything crazy. She could have been a fine satirical comedienne, a great Becky Sharp or historical farceuse, but it didn’t occur to her or her studios to go that way.
Based on a successful 1930 Broadway play, Smart Woman seems written for Astor. It was made soon after Holiday, using essentially the same cast, and oozes the sort of mainline conventionality of Philip Barry’s plays. Astor plays Nancy Gibson, an excessively happily married wealthy wife, who returns home to upscale Long Island after a European sojourn to find that her excessively beloved husband (played by the charisma-free Robert Ames) wants a divorce to marry a new amour. At first devastated by the news, Nancy gradually settles on a tricksy plan. She’ll pretend to accept the situation blithely and even to be having an affair herself with a man she grew friendly with on her transatlantic cruise back from Europe, the eligible British aristocrat, Sir Guy Harrington (John Halliday). She even invites her hubby’s new excessively blonde lover (Noel Francis) and her scheming mother (Gladys Gale) to stay for a visit at her impressive house. She’s pretending to be part of the smart set, see, but she’s smart like a fox — get it? Everything eventually goes according to plan. Despite the the fact that Halliday’s Sir Guy is altogether a better man and match for her than her oafish husband, the married couple is reconciled and the interlopers are expelled. Sir Guy returns to his eligibility with an elegant soupcon of regret.
For pre-Code, it’s all thin gruel and not very humorous. Astor is fine but she performs Nancy on a borderline between serious drama and urbane salon comedy. The wonder here is that the film was directed by La Cava, who was soon to make some of the most uninhibited comedies of the Thirties. I assume that at this early point in his career, RKO decided he was a journeyman jack-of-all-genres despite his experience with animation and propensity for wild and woolly comedies in the Twenties. Smart Woman is, as they say, interesting for LaCava and Astor completists, but doesn’t offer much else.
