Biography of a Bachelor Girl

Robert Montgomery is helping a free-thinking artist, played by Ann Harding, write "Biography of a Bachelor Girl," a 1935 film.

Harding plays a famous artist, Marion Forsythe, who's been around (as bluntly as it could be said after the code went into effect), and Montgomery is Richard Kurt, a magazine editor, who wants her to write her biography. She has painted the portraits and heaven knows what else of some of the most famous people in the world.

Marion agrees, but an old beau of hers, Bunny (Edward Everett Horton) shows up and tries to discourage her from publishing her story. He is a chapter, and he's running for the Senate and presently engaged to the daughter of an influential publisher. This could ruin him.

Nice story with a fine performance by Harding, and a departure from the films of hers I've seen. She is usually a very serious, proper woman. Here she is flirtatious, comfortable, and disarming. Every man she meets succumbs to her gentle charm. This includes Kurt, whose name she never remembers and who is becoming increasingly frustrated, particularly when she begins to second-guess the biography.

Edward Everett Horton is very funny as Bunny (whom she doesn't remember when she first meets him), and Montgomery is good as Kurt. He, like Melvin Douglas and some other actors, was much better than his material and really didn't have a chance to show what he could do until, at his insistence, he did "Night Must Fall." Later on, he became a successful director.

Worth seeing for Harding's performance.

She's nearly forgotten today, but Ann Harding was a true cinema aristocrat in the '30s, a movie star who didn't look like one (she wore practically no makeup) but was lovely all the same. She didn't act like one, either. Here, she's a free- thinking artist (referred to by other characters as "Bohemian," and it's clearly an insult) whose projected tell-all autobio is going to put an old flame's political career in jeopardy, and she's so obviously more intelligent than any of her co- players that you can't take your eyes off her. Calm, ladylike, and vaguely amused by her surroundings, she's a lot like her contemporary Irene Dunne, but less forced. The movie, from a smart S.N. Behrman stage comedy, is a civilized affair where characters bat around words like "propinquity" without flinching and the slowish pacing feels right. Perfect it's not, particularly in the male casting: Robert Montgomery, as her perpetually dissatisfied editor, doesn't stint on the character's unlikability, which leaves one rooting only halfheartedly for their romance to alight. And Edward Everett Horton, as her compromised ex-beau, isn't believable for a moment, being so obviously... Edward Everett Horton. On the other hand, Edward Arnold, the screen's best Evil Plutocrat of the '30s, is here a quiet, sympathetic spurned beau, and completely charming. It's a pleasant journey back to a time where the general public was more sophisticated, though without Ms. Harding's presence, it wouldn't add up to nearly as much.

Ann Harding is about to have ghost written her Biography Of A Bachelor Girl. She's a portrait painter, but in a part years before such a thing was an occurrence she's more of a professional celebrity. She paints famous and near famous people's portraits and gets involved with them. She's even got a ghostwriter, the iconoclastic Robert Montgomery who hates even the very idea of her.

One person who is very concerned is Edward Everett Horton who knew her back when and he doesn't want Ann writing about him. He's marrying Una Merkel and her father Charles Richman is Horton's chief backer in the Red state he would be representing.

Montgomery may quit the project anyway because he's getting angrier and angrier about someone he's developing feelings for.

Biography Of A Bachelor Girl is something a decade later Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn might have done. Surely it would be better know if they had. But that's not taking anything away from Montgomery and Harding.

In the supporting cast you'll like Edward Arnold who is a foreign born composer of uncertain nationality. Arnold he's kind of fallen for Harding himself, but he has a sort of bemused tolerance for all that's going on around him. Charles Richman is one tyrannical tyrant, thinking he has the right to tell everyone else how to live. He gets a lot of rebellion in his close circle for his trouble.

Montgomery and Harding are surely not as well known to today's audience. But Biography Of A Bachelor Girl should be better known. This one's a sleeper and a keeper.

Robert Montgomery is the editor of a muckraking magazine. He wants Ann Harding to write her memoirs. She is a painter who has gained a notorious reputation on two continents. She returns to the US broke, and accepts the offer. As she works with Montgomery on the book, she grows kinder and Montgomery grouchier. Also old boyfriend, Edward Everett Horton shows up with fiancée Una Merkel and her father, Charles Richman, who fear for Horton's political future if all is known.

There are hints that the S. N. Behrman play this was based on had been hot stuff, and had it been released a couple of years earlier, it would have been very funny, particularly given the farceurs in its cast. I can see the ghosts of many opportunities for exits with slammed doors and circumlocutious language. However, in those two years, the production code had passed, and not only might no one even discuss what Miss Harding had done - not that it was necessary- but no one gets angry enough to slam a door. Montgomery expends all his energy in angry speeches, Miss Harding is too much the lady, and Horton more childlike.

It's probably all that MGM figures they could get past the Hays office. Too bad.

... because you can tell by the dull empty stretches that everybody involved would just love to make a precode, would love to come out and say what is being insinuated, but they just can't.

The film is about a magazine editor, Richard Kurt (Robert Montgomery) who wants to pay a globe trotting artist who has had many affairs (Ann Harding as Marion Forsythe) to write her biography. He's actually not expecting her to write it so much as have her tell her various stories and then he can translate it into salacious text.

Marion agrees because she needs the money, but the two have a basic difference in viewpoint because Marion is a very tolerant individual and Kurt is not, and he seems to love not only the amount of money to be made in the biography but the idea of exposing the publicly sanctimonious people with which Marion has been involved. Then there is Edward Everett Hornton as a bag of wind who is running for senate who was Marion's first love in Tennessee, and he fears if his name is mentioned in this biography it will be the end of his senate hopes.

This film starts out fast funny and energetic with some great scenes and dialogue, but about a half hour in it begins to bog down, because the film simply is not allowed to come out and say the things that are insinuated. I really love Robert Montgomery, but the end of the precode era really took a bite out of his career for a few years as he was great at playing the precode playboy and those roles no longer existed. Although I will say it was interesting to see Montgomery play a role angry rather than glib as he did in so many other films.