I Take This Woman

Lots of people may watch this and believe it is about two people from different worlds finding each other and the problems they encounter when the honeymoon is over. I think it is more than that.

The story starts with wealthy beautiful slacker heiress Kay Dowling (Carole Lombard) being seen in a public place with a married man (Oh the horror!). The wife is threatening divorce and naming Kay as co-respondent. Kay says big deal, but dad says she needs to either marry her forever fiancé or go out west to dad's ranch in Wyoming until things simmer down or he will disinherit her. So off she goes to the ranch - you get the feeling that forever fiancé is putting her feet to sleep. While out west she meets cow hand Tom McNair (Gary Cooper). He makes her feel foolish a couple of times - like a city slicker which is what she is, and so she decides to make him feel foolish by getting him to fall in love with her. It works, but she falls in love too. They hastily marry, but Kay finds she is quickly not only a fish out of water, but on another planet.

Her wedding gift from Tom's fellow cowhands is a stuffed deer head. Tom can't stay on as a cow hand and just sleep in the bunkhouse, so he gets a run down one room cabin as a house for the two, and begins ranching. All the money has to go to the cattle, so there are no extras. But worse, there is the horrible isolation of the Wyoming winters. When she arrived, Kay was there during the three months out of the year they have good weather. She wants to pack it in and go back home, but a neighbor lady in whom she confides says industry does not come easy to Tom, and that unless he has somebody besides himself to work for, he will just walk away from his ranch and go back to being a cowpoke.

So it turns out these two have more in common than you would first think - they are both drifting through life in their own way unless something bigger than themselves wills them forward. How does this turn out? Watch and find out.

Lombard and Cooper gave great rather understated performances. They were quite good at expressing a range of emotions without a great deal of dialogue. The one real question mark in the cast is the part of Kay's dad. He never seems to step out from behind his desk, never has a tender word for his daughter though she is his only child, and seems to only care that she is not a headline with no thought to her happiness.

I'd definitely recommend it as one of the better made and acted early talkies.

Is it the source material, Mary Roberts Rinehart's novel? Is it Vincent Lawrence's adapted screenplay? Is it the direction of Marion Gering, making his film debut? Or is it some combination thereof that makes 'I take this woman' come across with a bare-faced plainspokenness that flattens nearly any sense of drama or humor? The plot progresses with the simple-minded curtness of a twelve-year old's first fan-fiction: "This happened. And then this happened. This happens next." It's one matter to decline embellishments in storytelling and film-making; it's another to be so straightforward that cuts to shots of a calendar are an exciting change of pace. None of this necessarily means the feature is entirely without value, but the movie-going experience is all but reduced to a level of receiving a gift with the price tag still on, discovering a puzzle that's already solved, AND being told every turn in a narrative the moment you buy a book. If you can appreciate the sometimes more modest entertainment of older films, and are the sort of person who can enjoy stories even after they've been spoiled for you - well, this is far from essential, but 'I take this woman' is an okay watch if you happen across it.

The core concepts of the writing are fine, the cast is strong - and give suitable performances, despite the subdued constraints of the title - and Gering's direction is technically capable. I think the plot is rather engaging, at face value, even if it bears very familiar themes of "growing up," and "finding oneself," and so on. I admire the production design, costume design, hair and makeup, and even the editing. Not to somewhat return to an aforementioned notion, but if this picture were a jigsaw puzzle, then all the requisite pieces are here, sure enough. Somehow, however - somewhere in the mix, that puzzle got flipped, so instead of a fetching, vibrant image, what we see before is the brownish-grey cardboard backing.

True, at some uncertain point about halfway through this issue lessens, and 'I take this woman' becomes a little more actively compelling. It's a problem that never feels fully resolved, though, even at the climactic peak of the interpersonal quagmire, and the ending seems uncharacteristically rushed and untidy. And that pervasive directness is adjoined by another glaring matter that rears its head from the very start: this is distinctly sexist. And it didn't have to be. Lead female character Kay Dowling (Carole Lombard) is overly brash and strong-headed, sure, but that irascible willfulness marks her as an independent, liberated woman. Yet these admirable qualities are practically taboo in 1930s cinema, so of course the feature focuses heavily on the notion that she must be "tamed" and "domesticated"; a revealing line of dialogue from male lead Tom McNair (Gary Cooper) even likens Kay to an animal that must be broken. Why, the title alone - "I take this woman" - connotes in one breath traditional vows of marriage, and the notion that a woman is a mere thing to be possessed, and emphatically centers the male perspective.

Sigh.

There are good ideas here. There really are. I had mixed expectations but high hopes as I began watching, especially with Lombard and Cooper involved; their reputations alone say much. Yet the strength that exists in the fundamental elements of the picture very much face off against the way they are all brought together, and it's quite a one-sided bout. You could do a lot worse, no matter what era of film your comparison is - but you could also do a whole lot better. If you can't get enough of the stars or movies of the 30s, then I suppose there's a particular reason to watch this. Otherwise, 'I take this woman' is best considered for when you want to sit for a movie without needing to be wholly invested.

The ninety minutes that I spent watching the 30 year old Gary Cooper deliver a performance that was as interesting as watching paint dry could have been used more productively in other ventures. The sum total of his emotional depth is to play with his ears when he is told something serious or profound by one of his colleagues. His stock retort is 'yar', 'hmm' and 'okay'. There is nothing fresh or inspired in his delivery. It is as though he feels the need to say something to avoid awkward silences rather than responding with the required character nuances that any human being has to face when they are presented with unfamiliarity. The guy can't act for peanuts.

The presence of two screen legends, Gary Cooper and Carole Lombard, starring in I Take This Woman make this film one earmarked for preservation and fortunately it was not lost to us. They did two films for Paramount, the later one is Now And Forever and also starred Shirley Temple. Because of Shirley it's far better known and the two stars were slightly better served.

Carole Lombard is a notorious heiress and flirt who keeps winding up on what would have been page 6 back in the day of the tabloids. No doubt Walter Winchell has written numerous columns on her various escapades and it's decided by both her father and Charles Trowbridge and ever available suitor Lester Vail that she should marry or take time at the family ranch out in the west. As Vail is earnest but dull, Lombard takes the ranch.

Where she sees something new she likes, lean and lanky cowboy Gary Cooper. She marries him for spite and dear old dad disinherits. Soon she's living on his small spread.

I don't think that I have to go any further. Anyone who has seen a gazillion films from the studio era like I have can predict this one. In fact a lot of the same story Gary Cooper did with Merle Oberon for Sam Goldwyn in The Cowboy And The Lady. Maybe this one should have had a lighter touch like the other film.

Both stars are cast quite comfortably in roles that fit them. Other than their presence there's not all that much to recommend I Take This Woman. Both were capable of and did better.

Still I'm glad this film was rescued and restored.

Lombard is rich, spoiled heiress, and dad is really mad about her latest escapades. He demands that she go out west to their ranch or be disinherited. Her boyfriend suggests an alternative: they could get married and sail for Europe. Which will it be? Unhesitatingly, she chooses the ranch! These scenes are lightly played; will this be an "heiress and the cowboy" romantic comedy? No; it's something more than that! When she arrives at the western station, it becomes an altogether more subtle, more serious, far more interesting film. The man to meet her isn't there, and she impatiently honks the car horn. (There's a kid in the next parked car, and he thinks this is grand fun, honking the fancy horn on his own car.) When Cooper shows up, he ignores Lombard of course, but it's not done with standard "writers' business." Cooper piles into the front seat with another girl, and the two have an inconsequential conversation about shopping. (The girl is not seen again.) The next day, when the boss picks a man to show Lombard around, she surreptitiously fingers Cooper. And when he makes her look foolish, she first goes to the foreman to have him fired, but abruptly changes her mind: "No, it was my fault." The question the hands ask each other is, is she like her dad, or is she like her granddad, the grand old man they admired. They think maybe the latter. She tells her city companion that she's decided to make Cooper fall in love with her before they leave. This situation has been played out a thousand times in films and light fiction before and after this film was made, but never as simply and starkly as here. All of that "writers' business" is just canned and the scenes are pared down to the simplest, briefest moments. When the time comes for her to reveal her trick, the scene is short and elliptical. He starts leading up to ask her to marry him. She laughs, turns and steps away. From this he instantly understands the whole situation, and his one simple line of dialogue shows what he thinks of the trick. So she's going back east, and at the train she tells him, "I'm running away from you, but I won't forget you for a long time to come." Then at the last minute she gets off the train. And they get married. The heiress living in a one-room shack on a cattle farm in the middle of nowhere through a midwest winter; what are the odds of any realism? Against all odds, this film again comes through. Lombard is superb. She hates it but she bears it, she doesn't take it out on him. Her sense of fair play, of realizing his needs, of understanding that this is exactly what she signed up for, is so well articulated that, although it's obvious that she's having a tough time, still, when she pours out to a neighbor woman her utter feeling of desolation and her plan to leave as soon as possible and never come back, it comes a shock how deeply she feels it. She sees him through the winter, but then skips out, leaving him a letter. Back east, the film still doesn't falter. Her old boy friend asks, "Would you still marry me?" and she answers with a heartfelt yes. Then, in the same sincere and friendly tones, as only Lombard could, she says, "Tell me why I don't love you..." When Cooper shows up, he's never made to look foolish by the society folks, because he can't be made to look foolish. In fact, he has a good scene with the boy friend, where he effectively tells him to buzz off. OK, so the very end (which I won't detail here) isn't perfect; it's not exactly a letdown either.

An extraordinary film! Basically, it's an impossible story, but the singular way it's handled, from the directing, to the great spare, lean script, to, especially, the performances of the two leads, make it exceptional. The dialogue between the two throughout the film is so laconic, so simple; it pares away everything but what's absolutely necessary. Yet never does anyone avoid saying what he or she thinks. Cooper was a star presence but not yet an actor in WINGS and THE VIRGINIAN. Here he's learned the art so well that this is one of the best roles of his career!

And Lombard in these early "serious" roles is so much more interesting than her comedy turns. What's great and unique about Lombard is her obvious intelligence and maturity. Everything her characters do is thoughtful, even when her emotions are in play, but never intellectualized. She is never "feminine" in the way of other players of intelligent women from the period such as Claudette Colbert. I respond to her as a modest and unassuming person with great maturity and character. Someone you'd really like to know very well.

Apparently, this became an "orphan" film when the rights reverted to author Mary Roberts Rinehart. The original negative and all supporting material was shipped back to her but she had no interest in it and it all disintegrated, except for one 16 mm acetate print, from which it has been restored. How incredible that such a major film might have been lost! And what other treasures are there still to be found from the pre-Code Parmount era?