Secrets of a Secretary

An enjoyable, well-acted pre-code, not very risqué except in theme. Claudette C is wonderful and so is Mary Boland, the upscale Marie Dressler.

I found this movie posted in full on youtube, a pleasant surprise, as I've never heard of it. A good way to spend an hour and fifteen minutes.

Claudette's character has to take a job as a social secretary upon her father's death, as she finds out he was broke. Just before he died, she had married a good-for-nothing on a whim, a wild night out. He leaves her when he finds out she is poor and starts working as a gigolo at a local club. When she meets an aristocrat after her heart, he is due to marry her former friend, the uppity daughter of her new boss, who is secretly see Claudette's sleazy husband. Complications arise...

Claudette Colbert is a party girl who gets married on a whim to George Metaxa. She comes home to discover her father dead, and broke, too; Berton Churchill has been carrying him since the Market Crash. Colbert asks him for a job. He gives her one as the social secretary to his wife, Mary Boland. Meantime, Metaxa, discovering Colbert is broke, abandons her and gets a job with Averell Harris' mob, and also sleeping with Betty Lawford, Churchill and Boland's daughter, who's engaged to Herbert Marshall at his most courtly. He and Miss Colbert clearly have a yen for each other, but are too good mannered to do anything about it.

At least, Miss Colbert should be in love with Marshall; in this pre-code drama, she seems dull and totally out of water. Everyone else is good or better, with Miss Boland, as is her wont, stealing every scene as a well-meaning nitwit, but director George Abbott seems unable to direct Miss Colbert to an interesting performance.

The copy I looked at was in poor shape, but I think a better copy would not have helped this movie, with Colbert utterly lackluster, it's just another mediocre programmer. Abbott would finish out his Hollywood sojourn with a couple more movies, then return to Broadway; he would direct three more movies, all from his stage hits, garnering 11 Tonies and a Pulitzer Prize. He lived to be 107, dying in 1995.

Want to see Claudette Colbert as a blonde? You'll have to see the beginning of Secrets of a Secretary; in the beginning she's at a costume party with a platinum wig on. She's also wearing a gorgeous black dress that shows off her lovely figure - ah, the pre-Code days. Everyone goes to costume parties, and everyone gets to show cleavage. It's no wonder she played Cleopatra!

In case you're curious of the plot of this movie, it's a riches-to-rags story. Claudette starts on top of the world, but then when her father dies, she learns she's inherited nothing more than a string of debts. The toast of society is forced to get a job - a humiliating prospect in that time period. She works as a social secretary to a frivolous woman, Mary Boland. Her husband Georges Metaxa also works, but it's hardly reputable. He's a gigolo at a nightclub. Mary's daughter is engaged to dapper gentleman Herbert Marshall, but Herbie's eye wanders over to the secretary. It's not the most admirable quality, but we'll forgive him because she's Cleopatra with a notepad and pencil.

This is a typical early '30s flick: problems we can't relate to anymore, lots of glitz and glamour, some melodrama thrown in, and acting styles we don't value nowadays. But if you like the cast you can check it out.

Helen Blake is a rich party hearty kind of girl who gets involved with a gigolo, and even marries him on a whim when she and her gang are making the party rounds and wind up in Pennsylvania. She goes home and finds out her father has had an attack of some sort, and he dies shortly afterwards. Later she finds out her dad died broke. He had lost his money in the stock market crash and had been subsisting off of loans from a family friend, Mr. Merritt (Berton Churchill). After paying all of the bills there will be nothing left. Her gigolo husband deserts her, claiming that she married him just for the money she thought he had, and Helen goes to work as a social secretary for Mr. Merritt's family. She is treated pretty well, but the daughter in the family, Sylvia, lost the gigolo to Helen, and she does the wicked stepsister routine towards Helen as much as she can get away with it.

How does this seguey into a suspenseful thriller? The gigolo actually goes and gets a job as a real gigolo at a nightclub, lifting older ladies' jewelry and giving it to his gangster boss from which he receives a cut. But the urge to cheat the gangster is irresistible to the gigolo, the urge to cheat on her British fiance (Herbert Marshall) with the gigolo is irresistible to Sylvia, and the British fiance, who is marrying Sylvia out of gratitude to her dad for a family favor, finds Helen irresistible. Complications ensue.

Mary Boland keeps things light as Mrs. Merritt who is kind to Helen and has some great one liners as she always plays the comic high society dame with flair. Note Millard Mitchell, who is uncredited, in a small role playing a cop twenty years before he is the rather clueless studio head in "Singin in the Rain".

This pre-code film showcases Claudette Colbert's acting at its finest. The plot is somewhat complex, beginning with her marriage to a gigolo, sudden loss of fortune and subsequent maltreatment by a woman who "sins" (right on screen--oh for those adult pre-code days of yore!). The minor disappointment caused by Herbert Marshall's dull performance in a dull role does not detract from the film overall; Colbert's versatility grabs the viewer from the start and carries you throughout. Compared to her other early performances, her work here may be her best. This film is a must-see for Colbert fans. Due to the plot and supporting performances (excepting poor Herbert's), however, even people who don't particularly like Colbert will enjoy it, too.