Grand Slam

1933 seemed to be a great year for satires ("Duck Soup" for instance) and this one fits in well even though it is about the obsession with contract bridge. The tone is like a humorous piece from The New Yorker, appropriate, since the film begins with the "Goings On About Town" page of that magazine. The only thing odd is the casting. Made a few years later William Powell and Myrna Loy would have been perfect. However, after 1934, you wouldn't have had adultery handled in such a sophisticated fashion, the young and beautiful Loretta Young in some shear and slinky outfits, or a group of prostitutes listening to a bridge contest on radio. Even if you know nothing about bridge, you may still want to check out a rare example of Hollywood satire.

This may be the only full-length Hollywood film about contract bridge so I suppose you could as well call it the "War and Peace" or the "Abbott and Costello Go to Mars" of contract bridge films. The point is that it has as much connection with how bridge is played as its contemporary "Horsefeathers" has with how football is played. In case you missed it, Harpo Marx scores the winning touchdown in "Horsefeathers" while driving a horse-drawn garbage truck.

However, "Horsefeathers" did make some salient points about universities where football has priority over education and the administration pays professional "students" to play who never see the inside of a classroom. Of course that was back in the 1930s. Today's universities are ...

Never mind. Getting back to bridge, in 1931-32 the game enjoyed its fifteen minutes of fame with "The Bridge Battle of the Century" between Ely Culbertson and Sidney Lenz, with the winner getting to sell more books about his bidding system. The fifteen minutes were somewhat literal in this case as NBC radio broadcast a fifteen-minute summary of each day's action, which was also reported on the front pages of the nation's newspapers.

So just as "Horsefeathers" was more accurate about the milieu in which football was played than about how the game was played, "Grand Slam" has its fun with the idea of crowds gathered around radios and electronic news tickers for the latest results of a bridge match. It's also fairly accurate in depicting the whining, gloating and backbiting endemic among serious bridge players, of which I am one.

Aside from that, it's a lightweight romantic comedy of average quality. Nothing really "pre-code" about it. If you play bridge at all you may get a kick out of the ridiculousness of the few scenes where they're supposedly playing the game. If not, I hope this description of the film's circumstances will increase your enjoyment of it.

This film breeches the fine line between satire and silliness. While a bridge system that has no rules may promote marital harmony, it certainly can't promote winning bridge, so the satire didn't work for me. But there were some items I found enjoyable anyway, especially with the big bridge match between Paul Lukas and Ferdinand Gottschalk near the end of the film. It is treated like very much like a championship boxing match. Not only is the arena for the contest roped off in a square area like a boxing ring, there is a referee hovering between the contestants, and radio broadcaster Roscoe Karns delivers nonstop chatter on the happenings. At one point he even enumerates "One... Two... Three... Four..." as though a bid of four diamonds was a knockdown event. And people were glued to their radios for it all, a common event for championship boxing matches. That spoof worked very well indeed.

Unfortunately, few of the actors provide the comedy needed to sustain the intended satire. Paul Lukas doesn't have much of a flair for comedy and is miscast; lovely Loretta Young and the usual comic Frank McHugh weren't given good enough lines; Glenda Farrell has a nice comic turn as a forgetful blonde at the start of the film, but she practically disappears thereafter. What a waste of talent!

From First National Pictures, some big names: Glenda Farrell was "Torchie"...Loretta Young was just in EVERYTHING in old hollywood. Paul Lukas and Loretta Young are Peter and Marcia Stanislavsky, experts at bridge. Roscoe Karns and Frank McHugh are along for laughs. We're nine minutes in, and no plot so far. One of the bridge players keeps doing flips and somersalts while the others keep playing. Peter writes a book on bridge, but when things go wrong, they go wrong in a big way. Peter challenges his main opponent to a bridge tournament, and it's the game of the century. It's all quite a silly show, and you really have to go along for the ride. Seems to be based on the up-and-coming bridge experts that were appearing in all the newspapers around the country. It's all okay. No big deal, but it does have some pretty big stars in here. Interesting for that fact alone.

This reminds me of the Monty Python sketch, 'Summarising Proust' in its absurd silliness. The whole world stops to listen to a radio broadcast of.....a card game!

Although it's actually based on a real event, this has to be one of the daftest premises for a film ever. The outlandish pitch that someone must have given to Jack Warner and Darryl Zanuck to convince them to finance this sounds like one of the cons James Cagney did in his fabulous film, HARD TO HANDLE! Incredibly it works...well almost. It's not one of Warner Brothers' best comedies but it's still a pretty decent one.

It's directed in typical Warner Brothers breakneck speed so you don't have time to think to yourself: this is ridiculous. You just get dragged along with the madness. The script is both witty and natural which again adds to the overall believability of this and the acting is first rate. We get a lot more of Frank McHugh than in most of these types of film which is great; he's the one who makes this comedy an actual comedy. Loretta Young was an exceptional actress and is of course as faultless as ever in this. She was however not a comedian so Frank McHugh makes a perfect partner for her. What about Paul Lukas you might wonder - isn't he her co-star? He's probably the weakest link in this picture. I'm not sure whether he's playing his silly character straight for comedic effect or whether he's just a bit dull.