April Movie of the Month: Polly of the Circus (1932)

This month, Clark Gable is a straight-laced minister and Marion Davies is his sassy acrobat love interest in Polly of the Circus.

Clark is Father John Hartley, a small town minister living a peaceful life. The circus
comes to town, with its star attraction: trapeze artist Polly Fisher (Davies). She is
enraged when her risqué posters are covered up and confronts Hartley, who admits that her posters aren’t appropriate in the town. The crowd mocks her at her next performance, causing her to fall. She recuperates at Hartley’s house at his insistence since he feels guilty. Soon they fall in love. But his parish and bishop uncle (Aubrey Smith) don’t support him marrying a circus girl. When the church turns its back on him, the newlyweds struggle as he refuses to let her return to the circus and she doesn’t understand his devotion to the church.

Clark is completely wasted here. As a minister, they took away all of his gruffness, roughness and raw sex appeal. Here, his hair is lacquered to his head, his eyebrows heavily pencilled in and he walks around as the perfect boy scout. This is not the Clark Gable of A Free Soul and No Man of Her Own.

He is left to be the butt of Marion’s smirky acrobat, with Marion joking that if he got married he’d give his wife a great big kiss every Ash Wednesday and make her sleep out in a shed during Lent.

It is rather silly to see him in the white collar and being stoic and virtuious. Clark was not a religious man at all, barely ever attended church, so him preaching Bible verses is a bit much.

Marion and Clark do have chemistry though, and the love story is quite sweet.

I suppose it is not surprising that they have chemistry as during the filming of Polly of the Circus they had a brief affair. Marion was notoriously the mistress of newspaper magnante William Randolph Hearst but often strayed when someone exciting walked past her. Clark was unhappily married to Ria and still seeing Joan Crawford on occaison. Unlike many brief flings, theirs ended when the cameras stopped and they remained lifelong friends. Marion was one of the few of Clark’s leading ladies that attended his funeral.