I Take This Woman

Lombard is rich, spoiled heiress, and dad is really mad about her latest escapades. He demands that she go out west to their ranch or be disinherited. Her boyfriend suggests an alternative: they could get married and sail for Europe. Which will it be? Unhesitatingly, she chooses the ranch! These scenes are lightly played; will this be an "heiress and the cowboy" romantic comedy? No; it's something more than that! When she arrives at the western station, it becomes an altogether more subtle, more serious, far more interesting film. The man to meet her isn't there, and she impatiently honks the car horn. (There's a kid in the next parked car, and he thinks this is grand fun, honking the fancy horn on his own car.) When Cooper shows up, he ignores Lombard of course, but it's not done with standard "writers' business." Cooper piles into the front seat with another girl, and the two have an inconsequential conversation about shopping. (The girl is not seen again.) The next day, when the boss picks a man to show Lombard around, she surreptitiously fingers Cooper. And when he makes her look foolish, she first goes to the foreman to have him fired, but abruptly changes her mind: "No, it was my fault." The question the hands ask each other is, is she like her dad, or is she like her granddad, the grand old man they admired. They think maybe the latter. She tells her city companion that she's decided to make Cooper fall in love with her before they leave. This situation has been played out a thousand times in films and light fiction before and after this film was made, but never as simply and starkly as here. All of that "writers' business" is just canned and the scenes are pared down to the simplest, briefest moments. When the time comes for her to reveal her trick, the scene is short and elliptical. He starts leading up to ask her to marry him. She laughs, turns and steps away. From this he instantly understands the whole situation, and his one simple line of dialogue shows what he thinks of the trick. So she's going back east, and at the train she tells him, "I'm running away from you, but I won't forget you for a long time to come." Then at the last minute she gets off the train. And they get married. The heiress living in a one-room shack on a cattle farm in the middle of nowhere through a midwest winter; what are the odds of any realism? Against all odds, this film again comes through. Lombard is superb. She hates it but she bears it, she doesn't take it out on him. Her sense of fair play, of realizing his needs, of understanding that this is exactly what she signed up for, is so well articulated that, although it's obvious that she's having a tough time, still, when she pours out to a neighbor woman her utter feeling of desolation and her plan to leave as soon as possible and never come back, it comes a shock how deeply she feels it. She sees him through the winter, but then skips out, leaving him a letter. Back east, the film still doesn't falter. Her old boy friend asks, "Would you still marry me?" and she answers with a heartfelt yes. Then, in the same sincere and friendly tones, as only Lombard could, she says, "Tell me why I don't love you..." When Cooper shows up, he's never made to look foolish by the society folks, because he can't be made to look foolish. In fact, he has a good scene with the boy friend, where he effectively tells him to buzz off. OK, so the very end (which I won't detail here) isn't perfect; it's not exactly a letdown either.

An extraordinary film! Basically, it's an impossible story, but the singular way it's handled, from the directing, to the great spare, lean script, to, especially, the performances of the two leads, make it exceptional. The dialogue between the two throughout the film is so laconic, so simple; it pares away everything but what's absolutely necessary. Yet never does anyone avoid saying what he or she thinks. Cooper was a star presence but not yet an actor in WINGS and THE VIRGINIAN. Here he's learned the art so well that this is one of the best roles of his career!

And Lombard in these early "serious" roles is so much more interesting than her comedy turns. What's great and unique about Lombard is her obvious intelligence and maturity. Everything her characters do is thoughtful, even when her emotions are in play, but never intellectualized. She is never "feminine" in the way of other players of intelligent women from the period such as Claudette Colbert. I respond to her as a modest and unassuming person with great maturity and character. Someone you'd really like to know very well.

Apparently, this became an "orphan" film when the rights reverted to author Mary Roberts Rinehart. The original negative and all supporting material was shipped back to her but she had no interest in it and it all disintegrated, except for one 16 mm acetate print, from which it has been restored. How incredible that such a major film might have been lost! And what other treasures are there still to be found from the pre-Code Parmount era?

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.

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.

Is it the source material, Mary Roberts Rinehart's novel? Is it Vincent Lawrence's adapted screenplay? Is it the direction of Marion Gering, making his film debut? Or is it some combination thereof that makes 'I take this woman' come across with a bare-faced plainspokenness that flattens nearly any sense of drama or humor? The plot progresses with the simple-minded curtness of a twelve-year old's first fan-fiction: "This happened. And then this happened. This happens next." It's one matter to decline embellishments in storytelling and film-making; it's another to be so straightforward that cuts to shots of a calendar are an exciting change of pace. None of this necessarily means the feature is entirely without value, but the movie-going experience is all but reduced to a level of receiving a gift with the price tag still on, discovering a puzzle that's already solved, AND being told every turn in a narrative the moment you buy a book. If you can appreciate the sometimes more modest entertainment of older films, and are the sort of person who can enjoy stories even after they've been spoiled for you - well, this is far from essential, but 'I take this woman' is an okay watch if you happen across it.

The core concepts of the writing are fine, the cast is strong - and give suitable performances, despite the subdued constraints of the title - and Gering's direction is technically capable. I think the plot is rather engaging, at face value, even if it bears very familiar themes of "growing up," and "finding oneself," and so on. I admire the production design, costume design, hair and makeup, and even the editing. Not to somewhat return to an aforementioned notion, but if this picture were a jigsaw puzzle, then all the requisite pieces are here, sure enough. Somehow, however - somewhere in the mix, that puzzle got flipped, so instead of a fetching, vibrant image, what we see before is the brownish-grey cardboard backing.

True, at some uncertain point about halfway through this issue lessens, and 'I take this woman' becomes a little more actively compelling. It's a problem that never feels fully resolved, though, even at the climactic peak of the interpersonal quagmire, and the ending seems uncharacteristically rushed and untidy. And that pervasive directness is adjoined by another glaring matter that rears its head from the very start: this is distinctly sexist. And it didn't have to be. Lead female character Kay Dowling (Carole Lombard) is overly brash and strong-headed, sure, but that irascible willfulness marks her as an independent, liberated woman. Yet these admirable qualities are practically taboo in 1930s cinema, so of course the feature focuses heavily on the notion that she must be "tamed" and "domesticated"; a revealing line of dialogue from male lead Tom McNair (Gary Cooper) even likens Kay to an animal that must be broken. Why, the title alone - "I take this woman" - connotes in one breath traditional vows of marriage, and the notion that a woman is a mere thing to be possessed, and emphatically centers the male perspective.

Sigh.

There are good ideas here. There really are. I had mixed expectations but high hopes as I began watching, especially with Lombard and Cooper involved; their reputations alone say much. Yet the strength that exists in the fundamental elements of the picture very much face off against the way they are all brought together, and it's quite a one-sided bout. You could do a lot worse, no matter what era of film your comparison is - but you could also do a whole lot better. If you can't get enough of the stars or movies of the 30s, then I suppose there's a particular reason to watch this. Otherwise, 'I take this woman' is best considered for when you want to sit for a movie without needing to be wholly invested.

Kay Dowling (Carole Lombard) is a very spoiled brat. Because her family is rich, she doesn't take life very seriously and occasionally gets herself into trouble...and knows they'll bail her out of whatever predicament she gets herself into from time to time. While her father talks tough and convinces her to go out west to find herself, he and the rest of them are enablers and as a result Kay is a very weak person.

Out west, she inexplicably falls for a poor ranch hand, Tom (Gary Cooper). Very impulsively (how else would Kay do ANYTHING??), she marries him and they are dirt poor, living in a cabin on a desolate ranch. Not surprisingly, she soon tires of it and goes running back to her parents. What's next?

In many ways, this is less a traditional film and more a morality tale. But it fortunately does not come off as heavy-handed and is well acted. Not a great film but a good one worth seeing.