Proud Flesh

Odd little romantic comedy from King Vidor and starring his future wife, Eleanor Boardman as Fernanda Borel, a girl born during the San Francisco earthquake but raised in Spain.

The snooty Fernanda decides to visit her uncle in Frisco to escape the attentions on Don Diego (Harrison Ford) but he follows her. Alone in Frisco with her duena, Fernanda can't get over the Frisco "mountains" but likes the hilltop mansion with many bathrooms. She is rescued from a wild taxi ride (a very funny sequence) by a passerby (Pat O'Malley) who owns a huge plumbing company. Of course Fernanda thinks he is a common plumber and snubs him.

With both men in pursuit, Fernanda plays coy and hard to get. There's a beautiful sequence at Cypress Point, where O'Malley wants to meet Fernanda because he thinks she'll be beautiful there in the wind. She is. There is also a big ball at which she wears an outlandish hat while things come to a head.

Boardman is quite good (as always) and Ford is funny in the odd role of a Spanish Don. I'm not at all familiar with O'Malley. Trixie Friganza plays the aunt, William Kelly is the uncle.

Vidor made this the same year he made The Big Parade.

Eleanor Boardman is a native San Franciscan, but she left as a toddler to be raised by her aristocratic Spanish relatives. Now she's returning to stay with her San Franciscan relatives, as she explains to her suitor, Harrison Ford. As she wends her way up a hill, plumbing magnate Pat O'Malley -- playing a character imaginatively called 'Pat O'Malley' -- gives her a lift in his auto. He falls in love instantly, but she cannot bring herself to love a mere plumber, until suddenly she does, and then equally abruptly, doesn't.

How very odd and random! At first I thought I was looking at a chopped-down copy, but no, there isn't much cut from the original running time. Of course, we fully expect that the aristocratic Miss Boardman will wind up marrying O'Malley, under whatever name he chooses to use in the film. It's a very odd movie for King Vidor to direct, but perhaps his issues with his own divorced wife, Florence Vidor, were coming through. If so, what does it say that he and Miss Boardman married the year after this was released?