Following the popularity of The Thin Man in 1934, MGM decided to keep the golden pairing of William Powell and Myrna Loy running on two parallel streams. One was to be the series of increasingly tepid and unimaginative sequels to The Thin Man. The other was a string of stand-alone comedies, all of them better films and funnier comedies than THE THIN MAN series. Of these, the first, Libeled Lady (1936), is one of the crown jewels of Interwar Hollywood comedy. Three others — Double Wedding (1937), I Love You Again (1940), and Love Crazy (1941) — were also quite good. The studio and the stars could rely on the The Thin Man mystique to keep their comic cachet high, but it’s the four autonomous films that display their originality and range best.
The special beauty of the Powell-Loy singleton comedies is how varied they are, given a couple of core constraints: Loy must always be cool and restrained, a wry, detached observer or prude. Powell must be antic and edgy, a trickster or fool (usually both). In THE THIN MAN formula, they are complementary psyches from the get-go. In the stand-alones, they have to go through comic gauntlets to get there.
Only Libeled Lady attained sublime heights, as it melded a brilliant script with maximum star power (starring not only Powell and Loy, but also Jean Harlow and Spencer Tracy). Rather than trying to imitate it into a formula (which would have been difficult in any case, given the astronomical salaries it would have required), each of the later films seems to be confidently one of a kind. Double Wedding is an adaptation of a Ferenc Molnár play. I Love You Again is a loony amnesia-induced Jekyll and Hyde double identity farce. Love Crazy is a particularly urbane screwball, combining verbal and physical slapstick on the model of The Awful Truth.
Neither Powell nor Loy had long track records in physical comedy at this point. Loy proved her chops in The Thin Man, taking the film’s only pratfalls, but she would rarely fall again. Powell, however, showed his skill at slapstick in the great trout-fishing scene in Libeled Lady. I’m pretty sure Love Crazy was conceived as a vehicle to showcase those skills. The script is by Charles Lederer, one of Hollywood’s comic geniuses, an occasional member of the Algonquin Circle, who collaborated often with his friends Ben Hecht (on The Front Page and Comrade X, for example) and Howard Hawks (on His Girl Friday, and later I Was a Male War Bride, Monkey Business, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes). (Lederer also wrote one of the greatest science fiction scripts, The Thing From Another World.) Jack Conway, who had also helmed Libeled Lady, directed Love Crazy. Both films display Conway’s great skill at moving lots of words and scenes at rapid pace.
Love Crazy‘s status in the period’s comedy ecosphere is hard to get a handle on. It was popular when it was released, and it’s still popular with classic film buffs, if only because of the lasting appeal of the Powell-Loy team. Among film critics and historians it’s sometimes mentioned in passing, but it never gets careful attention. The great James Harvey even called it “almost unwatchable.” For me, it’s a neglected gem, and I find the neglect inexplicable.
Love Crazy comes toward the end of the screwball phase of Hollywood comedies. By 1941, the themes and forms of screwball comedy were matters of record. Audiences knew what to expect. Writers who wanted to keep their scripts fresh were almost compelled to make the films not only diegetically funny, they also had to amplify those themes and forms. They had to make them subtly meta, inviting audiences to admire their riffs. They had to be to some extent about screwball. Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett made screwball’s crazy dialogue the covering theme of Ball of Fire. Preston Sturges made screwball’s cogently absurd situations the frameworks for The Lady Eve and The Palm Beach Story. Lederer’s title implicitly distills the genre’s thematic essence. Love makes people do and say crazy things in screwball, and screwball is the style that tells that story. So “Love Crazy” refers not only to William Powell’s character’s plans to pretend to be loony in order to save his marriage. It’s also the name of the genre.
And the film does check the boxes of classic romantic screwball. Fast talking, energetic, and witty male and female protagonists in love with each other, but at cross-purposes. One of them has absurd plans that are the source of the basic misunderstandings, and they’re consequently behind the eight ball. The other has wit, persistence, and reserves of strength, but too little lunacy to impede the crazier agent. In their efforts to come together, the two of them encounter figures of social authority — judges, psychiatrists, policemen, parents, in-laws, and more conventional suitors — who try to force them into normality, without success. They also keep encountering objects that both block their paths and mysteriously help them along. What keeps Love Crazy from being a paint-by-the-numbers screwball is the way Lederer’s script takes these typical elements and piles them up, expanding their absurdity and accelerating the craziness into a big snowball effect.
The plot: The story opens with Steve Ireland (Powell), an obviously successful, impeccably dressed, suave New York penthouse denizen giddy at the prospect of celebrating his fourth wedding anniversary with his gorgeous, refined, and witty wife, Susan (Loy). Their love for each other is obvious for all to see. Each year they celebrate their anniversary by retracing the steps of their courtship. This time, in the interest adding a little zest to the routine, Steve suggests that they reverse the steps. Do everything backward. (Allegedly, they are following the customs of Baffin Island Eskimos. Just for fun. Steve is a fun guy who likes to mix things up. Susan likes it.) So, initially we see the Irelands as Nick and Nora Charles: sophisticated, humorous, in control of their world. But this doing-everything-backwards idea tempts the Comic Spirit a little too much. Backwards is just another name for topsy-turvy.
Unexpected trouble arrives in the person of Susan’s mother — more relevantly, Steve’s mother-in-law (Florence Bates) — who visits the Ireland apartment bearing a gift rug, and deciding to stay for a bite to eat.
Sent on a mission to mail Mother-in-Law’s insurance premium before the policy lapses, Steve exits his happy abode and embarks on a journey into Crazy. In the hotel lobby, he runs into Isobel (Gail Patrick), an ancien amour. She’s a looker, she is. She’s also married, but she’s real happy to see her Stevie again, who we now understand was a party guy in the past. Former girlfriends just want to have fun. Steve resists her charms, after all he’s blissfully married and it’s anniversary night. But his best intentions are tested by a screwy elevator. Up to now, the action has been restricted to play-like parlor comedy that might have worked on stage. With the elevator, we are plunged into cinematic space, and one object after another impinges on poor schlimazel Steve — the elevator, Isobel’s dog, Isobel’s shoes, and even Steve’s own hat.
We’re in Buster Keaton territory now. If you don’t believe me, try this:
Isobel sees a chance. She takes bedraggled Steve to her apartment for a little “first aid.” A little whiskey, a loosened tie and collar, a little snuggle. Steve revives enough to remember that Isobel’s first aid doesn’t stick to the rules. Isobel suggests that they go out on the town with their old crowd. As he escapes, she tells him, “you’re not married, you’re embalmed.” In any case, he must smell like he is.
Steve attempts to guide events back to normal, but the farce-machine is gearing up. The maid conveys q message from Isobel that Steve’s left his hat in her apartment. And Isobel wants her shoes back. And she wonders whether Steve has taken her dog. Steve might be able to explain such things to Susan, but his mother-in-law is a serious blocker. She might be hustled out of the way to go to her planned meeting with “Aunt Julia,” but there’s that rug. Following the comic axiom that a perilous object will not accept being a mere detail of decor, Mother-in-Law slips on the rug (she laughed when Steve took a fall earlier), and she’s hurt her leg. She can’t leave the apartment, and now Susan has to run to meet said Aunt Julia. (We never do see Aunt Julia. Yet another invisible obstacle.) Anniversary dinner ruined. Mean-minded mother-in-law in place to prevent anything good from happening. For a few hours at least, Steve must face the void. He has little idea of how much it’s smoldering, and lying in wait.
Forced to be courteous and consequently reduced to sub status by the Disapproving Mother, Steve is ripe for Isobel’s distraction. He’s between a Mother-in-Law and a Seductress, a suave version of a rock and a hard place. Confabbing from their respective balconies, he agrees to hang out with Isobel for a while.
When Susan returns from her silly mission, Steve is nowhere to be found, and Mother-in-Law knows why. She has overheard his conversation with Isobel and his tactics for getting free of his quasi-filial bondage. All situations have been operating on the logical lines of the farce-machine. Susan decides to challenge Steve’s imaginary (but not quite) dalliance with Isobel by pretending to have a tryst with her husband, Pinky (Donald McBride), whom she has never met. She makes a date with him over the telephone, and heads straight into a trick the Spirit of Farce always has waiting: she knocks on the door of the wrong apartment.
It’s a great scene. Loy is on her own for a while as a comic agent. She mistakes Ward Willoughby (Jack Carson), a handsome archery champion with a formidable torso, for Isobel’s husband, and tries to stage the illusion that they are having an affair for the moment when Isobel and Steve return to Isobel’s apartment. Naturally, Willoughby has no idea what any of it is all about, but he’s not one to reject the advances of Myrna Loy. When she discovers Willoughby’s not Pinky, she wants out, big time. As she leaves, Isobel and Steve exit Isobel’s real apartment, and Pinky arrives from his penthouse studio, where he had received Susan’s call earlier.
When Isobel and Steve arrive on Isobel’s floor, we get one of the great foursome scenes that screwball is so good at.
Steve is not a mere innocent victim of general bad luck. He lies to Susan that he had gone out for a drink with Isobel, whereas he had spent the interval of Susan’s absence in Isobel’s apartment. Susan had warned him that she can’t forgive a lie, but Steve insists on telling one anyway. For her, there’s only one path left, what Preston Sturges calls “the bust up.” End of part 1.
As Susan pursues a divorce, Steve crashes an upscale party she’s attending to persuade her to reconcile. He’s suffering terribly. So is she. She’s willing to give it a go if they start again in total honesty. So, Steve idiotically confesses that he had been in Isobel’s apartment that night. Bad move.
Steve desperately wants the divorce delayed, sure that Susan loves him and can be brought around. His brotherly lawyer lets him know that the only path forward for him is if he is judged to be insane, or at least manifesting symptoms, in which case the divorce can’t go forward for another five years. (I couldn’t believe that such a crazy law ever existed in the real world until I did a little research. For many years, a divorce would not be granted from a spouse ruled insane until the condition could be verified for at least three years; it appears that it’s still the law in several states.) Instantly, Steve, who has been a passive victim of Crazy up this point, understands that he has to flip the script — one of those happy moments when the figurative and literal meanings of the phrase coincide. He’ll take control of the lunacy. He’ll embody it. But it’s not in Steve’s nature to be fully in control of anything. After he has “freed” (i.e., jettisoned) shoes, top hats, and Mother-in-Law at the party, a trickster cockatoo “frees” Steve from his beloved watch. The Comic Spirit giveth and taketh away: Steve needed a topper to convince skeptics that he isn’t drunk, just crazy. The Watch-and-Cockatoo story does just that.
At the divorce hearing, the judge suspends the case for thirty days in order to investigate whether Steve is compos mentis or not. Susan sees through Steve’s plan. She doesn’t want the case delayed. To prove that he’s not insane, she persuades the judge to order Steve to appear immediately before “The Lunacy Commission.” With a month’s delay in the bag, Steve can back away from his crazy act. Still, he has a bad feeling.
Not without reason. His composure is thoroughly rattled when who should appear at the Commission hearing but Dr. Kluge (Vladimir Sokoloff), a psychiatrist who attended the party and witnessed the beginning of Steve’s insanity act. Kluge determines that Steve is schizophrenic (that’s bad), and that he should be remanded to the custody of his wife (that’s good). So it’s back to the crazy act.
That is, until Susan intrudes on the scene. Facing the prospect of having the divorce delayed for five years at minimum, and forced to “take care” of Steve at home, she flips the script yet again: she’ll have him committed to a nice asylum in the country. That should teach him a lesson. He’ll have to admit he has been faking it. End of Part 2.
So, Steve is conveyed from The Lunacy Commission to an asylum run by Dr. Wuthering (Sig Ruman). Steve has no hope of persuading Dr. Wuthering. That’s a given in Love Crazy‘s world. Ruman’s Dr. Wuthering, though, is not the genial Dr. Kluge, or the harmless psychiatrist of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Bringing Up Baby. Lederer’s script is funny but also chilling, as Dr. Wuthering (what a great name!) articulates German psychiatry’s disciplinary principles: “We’re going to find the root of your trouble and eradicate it. I promise you Mr. Ireland, we are going to rehabilitate you here. You will suffer, yes, but ultimately you will find yourself and emerge recreated. Cured.”
The comic logic of Love Crazy‘s middle section is structured on the cascading zigzags of “that’s good/no, that’s bad” and vice-versa situations. With Susan’s encouragement, Steve finally tells the truth about the evening with Isobel (that’s good), but Susan takes umbrage at his ostensible philandering (that’s bad). Steve learns that he can prevent the divorce, at least temporarily, by acting like a lunatic (that’s good), but his faux insanity is taken seriously by The Lunacy Commission (that’s bad), until the Commission recommends that he be remanded to Susan’s custody (that’s good); until, that is, Susan calls the bluff and has Steve sent to Dr. Wuthering’s asylum (bad). At the asylum, Steve tries to prove to Dr. Wuthering that he’s sane, without success (bad), until he overhears Susan telling Wuthering that if he really were insane, she’d take care of him, so he acts crazy accordingly (good), until Susan sees through his act again and walks away, leaving him in crazy mode again under Wuthering’s authority (bad). Willoughby shows up outside the asylum to vaunt over Steve by informing him that he’s taking a trip with Susan to Arizona (bad). But Steve tricks the asylum guards into thinking that Willoughby is an escaped inmate, and has him forcefully captured (satisfying, if not necessarily good). But Willoughby is a tricky guy, too; he tricks Steve into helping him escape (bad). Then Steve uses the same trick to make Wuthering help himself to escape (good). The doctors and police surmise that loony Steve was trying to kill Dr. Wuthering, and an all points bulletin is issued to catch the would-be homicidal maniac (very bad). Things have gotten seriously out of hand. Steve is on the lam, big time, and there’s no good turn on the horizon. End of Part 3.
Steve heads back home to Susan, the only person who can vouch for his sanity and help him to hide. In formal terms, he is headed to where classical farces like to conclude: where they started. The apartments. The cops are already with Susan in Steve’s apartment, so he first hides in Willoughby’s, until Willoughby chases him out. Next comes Isobel’s apartment across the hall. (Part 1 has given the audience a full picture of the dwellings’ layouts, all the better to arrange a chase-through-rooms.) Isobel is willing to help, but, worse luck, Pinky is now also present. More hiding and frantic bizness. A way out suddenly offers itself in the form of a mannequin that Pinky, a painter by profession, has been using for modeling purposes. Steve has an idea. He’ll need some additional object-world help, which he finds in two balls of yarn.
He appears in the midst of the police search brouhaha in drag as Steve’s “sister from Saskatchewan.” A lot of funny drag gags ensue.
The dizziness of the final section is forced, but the film sticks with the zigzag switcharoo logic to the end. Steve’s gender flip seems to be working, despite Willoughby’s suspicions, until the ball of yarn that constituted the Sister from Saskatchewan’s falsies begin to unravel literally, threatening to unravel Steve’s plot. But like the backward anniversary that began the story, Susan is on board with Steve’s escape plan. Turns out that this crazy love is a folie a deux.
Love Crazy is inspired work until it goes a bit too crazy and sitcommish in the contrived conclusion. A case might be made that every scene in the story is built around flips, and Lederer and his script doctors may have felt that William Powell appearing in spinster drag would be a topper, a culminating flip. It weakens the comedy for me, but it may just be me. In any case, it’s an example of a tendency by some studios in the late 30s and early ’40s to take actors who had established reputations as debonair smoothies and dress them as infantilized or emasculated clowns. The emasculation was usually enforced only for a scene or two, as a slapstick gag or a screwball curve. The model for it was surely Cary Grant in Katherine Hepburn’s robe in Bringing Up Baby. In Powell’s case, it may have been part of a plan to show that he could play broad comedy, not just the urbane dances of the impeccable Nick Charles. In any case, I’m not a fan, and it rarely led to good comic moments. Don’t believe me? I’ve got receipts.
