The Gay Bride

Carole Lombard is great, it's somewhat forgotten how good she was at delivering the one liners. She gets off some good ones as the golddigging chorus line girl who marries a gangster. The fact that the life expectancy of a gangster is short only complicates her plans. The film goes a off the rails when she falls for one of them. It would have been more fun to watch her carry on as she had but she is still worth watching. Zazu Pitts in a funny supporting role.

Carole's busy cleaning out her new husband, the always oafish Nat Pendleton, under the watchful but none-too-concerned eye of 'Office Boy' (who makes these names up?) played energetically by Chester Morris. You don't have to be a neurosurgeon to see how this one ends up. Several of her husband's cronies have eyes for her and Chester pretty much sits back and makes with the Jimmy Cagney-type wisecracks until he's inevitably needed to save Carole from the mess she's created. Car nuts will like the scene at the Mercedes dealer where she's buying a 1934 540K Roadster (deliberately paying too much) and cringe over Pendleton testing the bulletproof aspects of his armored limo. Made at the dawn of the infamous Production Code, THE GAY BRIDE is a lot like Warner's pre-code program entries only with MGM's added element of class. Carole's a pro and Chester Morris rates an 'A' for effort.

Carole Lombard came over from Paramount to star in this MGM film The Gay Bride with Chester Morris. This is a part that fits her like OJ's glove should have fit OJ, a nice wisecracking chorus girl who makes no bones about the fact that she wants a hefty bank balance for her husband.

As chorus girl you don't get to meet the cream of society unless they are out slumming. And speakeasies she frequents usually means gangsters who had the money during Prohibition.

Her cap is set for Nat Pendleton though personally she can't stand him. Pendleton is his usual amiable lug who can't resist giving her anything. Muscle he is, brains he's not.

Lombard who winds up with the only tangible assets when Pendleton is killed has to still go through Sam Hardy and Leo Carrillo before she winds up with Chester Morris, Pendleton's sharp assistant who knows that there is a limited future when Prohibition is repealed.

Morris and Lombard play well off each other. Laughs come in The Gay Bride at the expense of Nat Pendleton. Also from Lombard's sidekick Zasu Pitts who is great at being Zasu Pitts.

This is a good screwball comedy in the Carole Lombard tradition.

This lesser-known film is a very pleasant, not really expected surprise in the early career of Carole Lombard, at the moment it was really starting to take off. It offers her as many opportunities to start showing the full range of her acting skills as more well-known films of the same period such as Twentieth Century - while being clearly less ambitious, I find it also much more tightly scripted than the latter and her co-star Chester Morris whom I did not know is surprisingly good, while all supporting characters are top-notch as well. Basically this is just a comedy in the mob's' world of the Prohibition, though, but it is both a fast-paced and smartly-acted one, and with two main characters which actually are fairly original. Mary is a gold digger with no more moral compass than a boiled clam. She considers herself fully entitled, by the rights of a penniless lonely woman who has to fend for herself, to put her hands on any pot of gold no matter how - so far nothing that original, one thinks of the gritty character of Barbara Stanwyck in Baby Face the same year. However Carole Lombard makes Mary so breezily, unconsciously and innocently amoral, if one may say, that even when she drives her would-be gangster benefactors to kill one another in order to provide her with the booty she greedily and self-mindedly covets, nobody seems really able to keep her a grudge. That makes her a sort of screwball cousin of Lulu / Pandora, the innocent fatal woman who made an unforgettable icon of Louise Brooks. She is toxic, even lethally so, but that's not really her fault - and she's so pretty... One who is not really able to blame her is her co-hero, the even more originally scripted bodyguard-cum-bookkeeper (!!) character strangely nicknamed Office Boy. This is a hero who talks a lot and acts fairly little, though he knows how to keep being respected by the violent mobsters he knowingly works for, while refusing to get involved in the dirty parts of their trade. But, mind you, not because he feels them repulsive, if that was the case he should have quit much earlier. No, rather because he feels this is not worth the risks to him, he prefers the idea of a fixed, not so big though adequate salary, which he can earn without having to spoil his hands. Not a full-fledged gangster, certainly, but not really a knight in a shining armour of moral rectitude either. Office Boy insistently tries to dissuade Mary of marrying Shoots Magiz, the top gangster who is really crazy about her and later becomes an irreproachably devoted husband - again not for moral reasons but just because as a partner for a long and quiet married life, Shoot offers limited perspectives, which gets confirmed to have been quite true. Later on as he tries again to object to Mary's shenanigans finding ways to get rich with dirty money, his arguments keep on being the same - not that her ways are evil, but that they are very likely to put her into deep trouble. True again. And when he leaves the mob, one cannot be too sure that it is because he finally saw the light about these evil ways - rather that the gang war makes them too unsafe, and he prefers quitting once he has put aside enough money to live the quiet, modest life he craves. Interesting mob character indeed.

Easy to see why Lombard was the highest paid actress in Hollywood at one time. Breathtakingly beautiful and with a wonderful sense of humor. That said, The Gay Bride is a fun movie but very much on the modest side. An amusing trifle about a heartless, gold-digging chorus girl bent on marrying one gangster after another, only to see them wiped out before she can get her hands on the cash. Chester Morris, a gangster's book-keeper, the one true love interest - whom of course she despises because he has no money. Amusing sparks struck between the two that provides the main thrust of the comedy. The great Zasu Pitts in a wisecracking supporting role. Not a great movie but a few good laughs - and a chance to see Lombard at her most luminous. Worth the time.