I Take This Woman

Kay Dowling (Carole Lombard) is a very spoiled brat. Because her family is rich, she doesn't take life very seriously and occasionally gets herself into trouble...and knows they'll bail her out of whatever predicament she gets herself into from time to time. While her father talks tough and convinces her to go out west to find herself, he and the rest of them are enablers and as a result Kay is a very weak person.

Out west, she inexplicably falls for a poor ranch hand, Tom (Gary Cooper). Very impulsively (how else would Kay do ANYTHING??), she marries him and they are dirt poor, living in a cabin on a desolate ranch. Not surprisingly, she soon tires of it and goes running back to her parents. What's next?

In many ways, this is less a traditional film and more a morality tale. But it fortunately does not come off as heavy-handed and is well acted. Not a great film but a good one worth seeing.

Scandalous Carole Lombard is hustled out west to the family ranch to avoid another scandal in New York. Ranch hand Gary Cooper's contemptuous indifference to her incites her to make him fall in love with her. Trouble is, she falls in love with him, and marries him, which gets her disowned. Such is the sexual heat that she doesn't care, until a hard year of deprivation getting his ranch started sends her back to a life of luxury in New York, asking for a divorce by letter.

I looked for signs of Soviet class struggle in Marion Gehring's first movie for Paramount, from a novel by Mary Roberts Rinehart and with Slavko Vorkapich as "associate director" -- I guess he was doing his usual amazing montage work on this. I didn't find it, but a story of co-dependence, two individuals, neither of whom can do anything worthwhile alone, but together can accomplish something, set in that glossy Paramount world in which of course they fall in love, because they're beautiful. They're also pretty good at not understanding what it is they mean to each other until it's explained to them. Gehring got good performances out of them, just as he later would out Sylvia Sidney.

In many ways, this movie reminds me of Warner Brother's THE PURCHASE PRICE the following year, which I think is a superior movie. Perhaps that is because in this movie, the leads' love turns out to be much more selfish. I suppose that's a case of Your Mileage May Vary. Certainly, Stanywyck is at least as good an actress as Lombard is and Cooper is better than Brent in the other movie.

Gary Cooper and Carole Lombard are magic together. It is hard to tell if they are acting or just carrying on an off-screen romance on-screen.

At the beginning of the movie, socialite, playgirl Carol sashays over to her straight-laced aristocratic father, bends over and says, "Spank me, good daddy, I need it." You know immediately we are in a pre-code film.

Cooper plays a slow talking cowboy who doesn't think she's anything special. He tells her that all women are a disappointment to him. She's angry that he's not falling at her feet and drooling. She explains her plan explicitly to get him to fall in love with her. When the plan ends, she finds that she's succeeded, but she laments that she has also trapped herself. They're in love. That's the first twenty minutes of the movie, then it really gets interesting, as the movie explores the problems of love between two people from two different social and class backgrounds.

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 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.