I Take This Woman

Because of the two leads, I had to watch this film. Boy was I disappointed. Many awkward silences in this early talkie. Had this been made a decade later with both leads, I imagine it would have been better made since both made better films later in their careers.

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.

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.

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.

Lots of people may watch this and believe it is about two people from different worlds finding each other and the problems they encounter when the honeymoon is over. I think it is more than that.

The story starts with wealthy beautiful slacker heiress Kay Dowling (Carole Lombard) being seen in a public place with a married man (Oh the horror!). The wife is threatening divorce and naming Kay as co-respondent. Kay says big deal, but dad says she needs to either marry her forever fiancé or go out west to dad's ranch in Wyoming until things simmer down or he will disinherit her. So off she goes to the ranch - you get the feeling that forever fiancé is putting her feet to sleep. While out west she meets cow hand Tom McNair (Gary Cooper). He makes her feel foolish a couple of times - like a city slicker which is what she is, and so she decides to make him feel foolish by getting him to fall in love with her. It works, but she falls in love too. They hastily marry, but Kay finds she is quickly not only a fish out of water, but on another planet.

Her wedding gift from Tom's fellow cowhands is a stuffed deer head. Tom can't stay on as a cow hand and just sleep in the bunkhouse, so he gets a run down one room cabin as a house for the two, and begins ranching. All the money has to go to the cattle, so there are no extras. But worse, there is the horrible isolation of the Wyoming winters. When she arrived, Kay was there during the three months out of the year they have good weather. She wants to pack it in and go back home, but a neighbor lady in whom she confides says industry does not come easy to Tom, and that unless he has somebody besides himself to work for, he will just walk away from his ranch and go back to being a cowpoke.

So it turns out these two have more in common than you would first think - they are both drifting through life in their own way unless something bigger than themselves wills them forward. How does this turn out? Watch and find out.

Lombard and Cooper gave great rather understated performances. They were quite good at expressing a range of emotions without a great deal of dialogue. The one real question mark in the cast is the part of Kay's dad. He never seems to step out from behind his desk, never has a tender word for his daughter though she is his only child, and seems to only care that she is not a headline with no thought to her happiness.

I'd definitely recommend it as one of the better made and acted early talkies.