Drôle de mariage

"A Lady To Love" (1930) with some key differences.

Tony (Charles Laughton) is a simple yet successful Italian immigrant who owns a large grape farm in California. After he sees beautiful waitress Amy (Carole Lombard) during a trip to the city, Tony falls hopelessly in love, and he enlists his best friend and foreman Joe (William Gargan) in composing love letters to Amy to convince her to marry Tony. They succeed, but when Tony sends a picture of Joe instead of himself to Amy, things get complicated, as she arrives already in love with the image of Joe to only be told that the real Tony is something altogether different

I recently watched A Lady to Love from 1930, the earlier screen version of this story starring Edward G. Robinson, Vilma Banky and Robert Ames in the lead roles, so I spent a lot of time watching this version and comparing the two. This later version is better, but there are several changes to story points: in the early version, Amy marries Tony immediately upon arrival, while in this version they never actually get around to it. Tony gets injured in both versions, but the circumstances and outcomes are much different. And one very pertinent plot point which I won't spoil was absent in the early version, but very much a factor in this later one.

Lombard is very good in a serious role, and while Laughton is very broad, his role calls for it and his scenery chewing is acceptable, and not nearly as bad as Robinson's was. William Gargan earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, although his role is really a lead, and he even has more screentime than Laughton. Gargan is good, but not in a flashy way, and his role is one that seems like an odd choice for a nomination. It may have been a career acknowledgment, as he'd been a popular B-level leading man since the late 1920's. He was the real deal, too, when it came to tough guy roles, as he'd been both a bootlegger and a detective before he started in pictures. His movie career ran out of steam by the late 1940's, when he moved to radio and had a big hit with Martin Kane, Private Eye, a role that he also played on TV in the late 50's. A battle with throat cancer left him without a voice by 1960, although he lived until 1979.

The first work I see by Garso Kanin, he directs this film that goes from a comedy tone to a gray love drama. It stars Charles Laughton and Carole Lombard supported by William Gargan.

It is a film that stays in the middle, it starts out well, it is entertaining but it develops taking as understood situations that are not clear. The development of the Lombard and Gargan couple is taken by the hair, there is no moment where they connect and unless a deep problem arises. The problem of pregnancy is taken for granted and one does not know when it happened.

Remarkable performances although the script did not help much and the 3 characters are flat without much to say. Charles Laughton is surprising because at first it seems not to be very interesting and ends up being the moral. Carole is fine and looks as natural as possible despite the forced scenes she's in. Gargan in this role that begins lonely and mysterious but is halfway through development. He is nominated for 'Best Supporting Actor' at the Oscars and is the only nomination the film gets.

This is the third filmed version of Sidney Howard's play. Previously this was filmed a THE SECRET HOUR (1928) with Pola Negri and Jean Hersholt and as A LADY TO LOVE (1930) with Vilma Banky and Edward G. Robinson.

Here, Charles Laughton plays the Italian Tony, a successful grape grower in Napa Valley. He goes to San Francisco and is smitten with a waitress named Amy (Carole Lombard) and decides to marry her. Back home he gets his pal (William Gargan) to write a letter. She answers back. Eventually they send a picture and invite her to Napa.

Unfortunately they send a picture of Gargan. But Lombard has nothing to go back to but her dreary and demeaning job so she stays. Despite her best efforts she falls for Gargan right under Robinson's nose.

Basically a love triangle story, there's enough humor to defuse the slightly clichéd story. Lombard give a great performance as the feisty Amy. Laughton is hammy and loud but a pleasure to watch. Gargan won an Oscar nomination for the hapless Joe, torn between his devotion to Tony and his love for Amy.

Supporting cast includes Harry Carey as the doctor, Frank Fay as the priest, Victor Kilian as the photographer, Janet Fox as Mildred, and the film debuts of Karl Malden and Tom Ewell.

Good location shooting in Napa Valley opens up the film and adds a nice touch.

I can only assume that before he started out in the role he asked the RKO excutives to run "Room Service" so that he could perfect his Chico Marx impression for this film.He wears a black curly wig not unsimilar to Marx,and apart from the fact that he does not play the piano he does everything else.So little wonder that this film had a very tortured production costing over $850000 and posting a loss of over $200000.It is difficult to understand why Laughton did these sort of films.He made some great films in the 1930s however he went to Hollywood more or less for good in 1939 and almost ruined his career in the 1940s withs some awful films.Lombard is fine but unbelievable as the waitress and Fay dreadful as the priest.

Pretty darn grown-up for its day, this atmospheric adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play has waitress Lombard wooed by immigrant winegrower Laughton, becoming his mail-order bride, having an affair with ranch foreman Gargan, carrying his child, and being forgiven for it. (In this version, though, she has to go off and do some Breen Office penance first.) It's one of the very few dramas made under the Production Code where the unwed mother doesn't contract a fatal disease, die in a car crash, or plunge herself off a cliff. Lombard, an unparalleled comedienne, gets to show off her considerable and underrated acting chops, while Laughton does an unsubtle "paisano" caricature that might have been considered great acting in its day (this, after all, was the Paul Muni wig-and-accent era) but has dated badly. Lombard smolders in her scenes with the Oscar-nominated Gargan, their adultery cleverly conveyed by director Kanin through long soulful gazes, dark shadows, and moody music. Some other welcome faces turn up in tiny roles (Karl Malden, Tom Ewell, Nestor Paiva), and the only real irritant is Frank Fay's impossibly noble priest, lit from behind like a madonna and forever mouthing holier-than-thou "God is smiling on us" dialogue. You want to smack him one.

Stage musical fans who want to see how Frank Loesser's great "The Most Happy Fella" plays without music will be pleased to observe how faithful he was to the source material, and the characters' emotions really do sing here. It's a fast and unpretentious little film, and another reminder (as if we needed it) of how badly we were robbed by Lombard's early death.