Secrets of a Secretary

An enjoyable, well-acted pre-code, not very risqué except in theme. Claudette C is wonderful and so is Mary Boland, the upscale Marie Dressler.

I found this movie posted in full on youtube, a pleasant surprise, as I've never heard of it. A good way to spend an hour and fifteen minutes.

Claudette's character has to take a job as a social secretary upon her father's death, as she finds out he was broke. Just before he died, she had married a good-for-nothing on a whim, a wild night out. He leaves her when he finds out she is poor and starts working as a gigolo at a local club. When she meets an aristocrat after her heart, he is due to marry her former friend, the uppity daughter of her new boss, who is secretly see Claudette's sleazy husband. Complications arise...

Helen Blake is a rich party hearty kind of girl who gets involved with a gigolo, and even marries him on a whim when she and her gang are making the party rounds and wind up in Pennsylvania. She goes home and finds out her father has had an attack of some sort, and he dies shortly afterwards. Later she finds out her dad died broke. He had lost his money in the stock market crash and had been subsisting off of loans from a family friend, Mr. Merritt (Berton Churchill). After paying all of the bills there will be nothing left. Her gigolo husband deserts her, claiming that she married him just for the money she thought he had, and Helen goes to work as a social secretary for Mr. Merritt's family. She is treated pretty well, but the daughter in the family, Sylvia, lost the gigolo to Helen, and she does the wicked stepsister routine towards Helen as much as she can get away with it.

How does this seguey into a suspenseful thriller? The gigolo actually goes and gets a job as a real gigolo at a nightclub, lifting older ladies' jewelry and giving it to his gangster boss from which he receives a cut. But the urge to cheat the gangster is irresistible to the gigolo, the urge to cheat on her British fiance (Herbert Marshall) with the gigolo is irresistible to Sylvia, and the British fiance, who is marrying Sylvia out of gratitude to her dad for a family favor, finds Helen irresistible. Complications ensue.

Mary Boland keeps things light as Mrs. Merritt who is kind to Helen and has some great one liners as she always plays the comic high society dame with flair. Note Millard Mitchell, who is uncredited, in a small role playing a cop twenty years before he is the rather clueless studio head in "Singin in the Rain".

This is the perfect early thirties romance, it's even got gangsters! It couldn't be more 1930s if it tried - everything you want from an early thirties picture is here. It dripping with atmosphere, you feel you can actually smell the leather in those massive old cars; this picture really takes you there.

This is one of those perfectly presented pictures in which the characters are so real, you're living your life with them. Helped by the flowing photography, often representing different points of view, you get a sense of intimacy and immediacy watching this. There's an almost fly-on-the-wall approach employed to make it feel like you've got stuck in the room hiding behind a curtain eavesdropping on someone else's life. Maybe I was just in a funny mood but I honestly found this as engrossing and thrilling as MISSION IMPOSSIBLE - I was on the edge of my seat, almost hyperventilating with the excitement. Nobody had to choose whether to cut the red or blue wire on the bomb with three seconds to spare - no all that was happening here was that I was hoping nothing would go wrong - in the shape of spiteful Sylvia or nasty Frank, to spoil Helen and Paul's burgeoning romance - which you desperately want to happen.

As with most of George Abbott's films, this is superbly made and I wasn't just watching it, I was there, fully immersed. I could hardly bear to suspense - it's difficult to resist the temptation to fast forward to the end! Was this meant to be this exciting?

As any fan of early thirties pictures will know, when a high-society man dies having lost all the family's money in the '29 crash, his daughter invariably has to become a prostitute and his son a gangster..... except in this. Whilst this has every 1930s trope you can think of, what makes this a little different and more memorable is it's intelligent and believable story. It is set amongst the world of the wealthy but they're presented as real, three dimensional people. It's so refreshing not to see these people lazily depicted as evil baby-eating goblins for a change.

Herbert Marshal is always a pleasure to watch and given a good script like this, you can happily listen to that silky voice for ages. Although not one of his best-known films, along with THE GOOD FAIRY I think this might be one of his best performances. And there's Claudette Colbert! She was of course the most beautiful woman ever to walk the face of the earth (along with whoever else I've just watched!) but nevertheless, her acting style is so much more modern and natural than most of her contemporaries, she immediately makes her character 'Helen' completely believable.

Her character which represents normality and the good side of human nature provides a wonderfully stark contrast with the villain of the film played somewhat bizarrely by Georges Metaxa. Taken out of context, his performance seems utterly manic, almost like he's the wicked witch in a pantomime but since everyone else accepts his eccentricity (his very unpleasant eccentricity) as normal, that dichotomy works really well in contrasting just how nice and lovely and cuddly our cute couple Helen and Paul are. And I'm not being sarcastic - this really made me smile.

Claudette Colbert is a party girl who gets married on a whim to George Metaxa. She comes home to discover her father dead, and broke, too; Berton Churchill has been carrying him since the Market Crash. Colbert asks him for a job. He gives her one as the social secretary to his wife, Mary Boland. Meantime, Metaxa, discovering Colbert is broke, abandons her and gets a job with Averell Harris' mob, and also sleeping with Betty Lawford, Churchill and Boland's daughter, who's engaged to Herbert Marshall at his most courtly. He and Miss Colbert clearly have a yen for each other, but are too good mannered to do anything about it.

At least, Miss Colbert should be in love with Marshall; in this pre-code drama, she seems dull and totally out of water. Everyone else is good or better, with Miss Boland, as is her wont, stealing every scene as a well-meaning nitwit, but director George Abbott seems unable to direct Miss Colbert to an interesting performance.

The copy I looked at was in poor shape, but I think a better copy would not have helped this movie, with Colbert utterly lackluster, it's just another mediocre programmer. Abbott would finish out his Hollywood sojourn with a couple more movies, then return to Broadway; he would direct three more movies, all from his stage hits, garnering 11 Tonies and a Pulitzer Prize. He lived to be 107, dying in 1995.

This pre-code film showcases Claudette Colbert's acting at its finest. The plot is somewhat complex, beginning with her marriage to a gigolo, sudden loss of fortune and subsequent maltreatment by a woman who "sins" (right on screen--oh for those adult pre-code days of yore!). The minor disappointment caused by Herbert Marshall's dull performance in a dull role does not detract from the film overall; Colbert's versatility grabs the viewer from the start and carries you throughout. Compared to her other early performances, her work here may be her best. This film is a must-see for Colbert fans. Due to the plot and supporting performances (excepting poor Herbert's), however, even people who don't particularly like Colbert will enjoy it, too.