La femme aux gardénias

This delightful and oh-so-sophisticated combination comedy/drama was my personal favorite at Cinefest. With clever dialogue, fetching lead actors and delicious directing, I was hooked at the onset. Beautiful Ann Harding is seen cooking and explaining to her engaged sister (Lucile Brown) that to men, business is business but that marriage is the business of women. Harding sets her sights on William Powell, a super smooth playboy who inherited a struggling shipping line. She sets a trap arranging for her sister to send their father (stern Henry Stephenson) to Powell's apartment for the purpose of catching Harding and Powell alone. To save face, Powell agrees to marry Harding, at least for a while. On the honeymoon, Powell suggests a divorce, while Harding coolly recommends they wait six months so as not to seem too obvious. She then starts steering him to leading his company back to profitability by looking at it as a challenge. With his talents now attending to business and not bedroom conquests, Powell starts to enjoy his newfound success and begins to fall in love with his bride. In the meantime Harding's jealous sister, now unhappily married, has been living beyond her means and needs money fast. She blurts out the truth of the marriage trap when Harding refuses to again pay off her debts. Powell leaves, disillusioned. Harding's father has arranged for a huge business deal to be offered to Powell at a formal dinner party at their home that very night. As Powell is boarding a ship to Europe, his frazzled wife is at home greeting guests and trying to maintain composure. One by one, each guest is involved in a personal crisis and is pulled away from the dinner party from hell, presided over by blustery Reginald Owen as the butler. I can't go on with out spoiling the best joke. This forgotten film is four stars all the way. I saw this film in March of 2004 at the CINEFEST film festival in Syracuse, NY. Thank god for film festivals like this one that make rare films like this available and the folks who provide comments to IMDB for others to share. Please support the IMDB and early film festivals!

Really well done adaptation of the play to the screen. Rather wordy as was most early 1930's films, but quite charming nevertheless. And, indeed, rather risque for its day since there is a supposition at one point that Ann Harding's character, Joan, in trying to trap William Powell into marriage, is giving pre-marital favors and is actually caught in the process. The chemistry between Harding and Powell is quite good and it is unfortunate that the two were never paired again in another film.

Just saw this on TCM and I have to say I was floored by Harding's performance, who I saw here for the first time. It takes real talent to act in melodramatic scenes and deliver them so naturally that the viewer never questions your authenticity. Harding adds hundreds of little touches - a gesture here, an eye movement there, that make her performance show you what natural acting is all about. In fact, she makes everyone else pale by comparison - Powell is his usual charming self, but next to Harding he comes off as a typical Hollywood performer. And talk about sophistication! Harding has to be the ultimate in "cool". I can only guess the reason she didn't become as big as Hepburn or Davis is that she didn't fight for better films. I'll be sure to look for more of her work soon.

Ann Harding and William Powell are terrific in this strange little gem of a movie which runs the gamut from Pre-Code Drama to Screwball Comedy! (the closing dinner party scene is worth the price of admission). John Cromwell directs with a sure hand, especially in a great tracking shot involving the two sisters.

It's incredible how modern films seem to lack any sense of sophistication and style in comparison with even lesser known films from the 30's like this one.

A pure joy to watch.

Once again, the big thinkers at Turner Classic Movies have provided film buffs with a tremendous cinematic coup, this being the re-release of six films crafted by Merian C. Cooper as executive producer, and tied up in litigation over the screening rights for decades. Among these films is the social satirical gem, "Double Harness," which is available from TCM via those cable TV providers who have TCM On Demand.

The film is, therefore, free for viewing at the convenience of the customer and this one comes highly recommended.

In all honesty, it was not until the very final scenes of this film, that I realized it was set in San Francisco ( and not New York ), and that the entire production was a satire. The beginning and middle sections of this movie -- from a play by Edward Poor Montgomery -- seem to fit nicely in the oh-so-predictable slot of "melodrama." Just about every player in this film is a character carved strictly out of "upper crust" marble, with all the trappings of the idle rich in the '30s.

Not that the idle rich in the Depression years had it so good, of course, as they apparently had to cut back on the caviar before dinner at least once in a while. The alert film buff will realize that this story is strictly from "la la land" in the first scenes, where the two sisters Colby are viewing bridal dresses for the younger one, Valerie, who is about to be married. The bill for her trousseau comes to well over $ 3000 at a time when $ 100 per week was a lot of money for a family of four. And by the way, everybody smokes ... a lot.

Everyone in this movie is fabulously wealthy by the standards of the day, even though their interests are under pressure from the economic turbulence of 1931-1932. Losses from a bank failure are mentioned in passing in one scene, but the audience cannot help but be captivated by the opulence of the lives of these characters. This film also serves to further establish the absolute brilliance of William Powell, who is the lazy playboy named John Fletcher, heir to a shipping line.

Powell seems to play his character with an almost sublime restraint, and a barely concealed exuberance: it is as if he knew in his subconscious mind that this was an "Ann Harding" picture and it was his duty to bolster her performance and her presence. He does so, in the most magnificent fashion, and it adds power to the social satire which is the weave of this cinematic fabric. It all comes together at the end, where a most elaborate private dinner party collapses into a drunken disaster for the younger sister, and a fist-fight for the butler and the cook !! And there's a happy ending, too, of course.

The only thing this film lacked was more ... more of the luminous Ann Harding, more of how she was slowly capturing the real man inside the phony, shallow playboy Fletcher, and more of how William Powell brought that character into reality from a stiff and rather formal screenplay, the kind of "very talkative" cinematic fiction so common in that era.

Nine of ten, and since it can be viewed for free, On Demand, it is highly recommended to any and all film buffs.