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Movie of the Month: Hold Your Man (1933)
Probably the least-known of Clark and Jean Harlow’s pairings, Hold Your Man is a scandulous pre-code with a pretty good melodrama in its center. Gable is Eddie Hall, a small-time con man on the run from the cops when he bursts into Ruby Adams’ (Jean Harlow) apartment and finds her in the bathtub. Ruby and Eddie quickly realize they are two peas in a pod: she is somewhat of a con artist herself, seducing and manipulating men to get what she wants. This is definitely pre-production code stuff, as the film offers no innuendo to cover up the fact that Eddie and Ruby are sleeping together. One of Eddie’s cons…
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Movie of the Month (December): Red Dust
Yes, I am a very bad webmistress and didn’t post this in December. Holidays and all that…But I will make it up to you and post it now and post January’s Movie of the Month next week. Two Jean and Clark movies in one month ain’t a bad month! A Free Soul (1931) is usually described as being Clark’s breakout performance. I’ll agree with that. But if A Free Soul made people notice him, Red Dust truly thrust him into super stardom. He is at his swoon-worthy best here: always sweaty and dirty-looking, hair flopped aross his face, shirt haphazardy open, caught between two lovely ladies. Clark is Dennis Carson,…
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Movie of the Month: The Secret Six (1931)
The centennial of Jean Harlow’s birth is coming up in March 2011. To celebrate, the next five movies featured will be all of Clark’s movies with the legendary Miss Harlow. (But wait! You are saying–they starred in six movies together! True, but we’ve already featured Wife vs. Secretary as Movie of the Month in July) So to start with, here’s the very first of their pairings… The Secret Six, from 1931 Clark, not yet a star, was still playing second fiddle. Billed seventh, he is lagging behind Wallace Beery, Johnny Mack Brown and Lewis Stone for screen time. Not for long, as just a few months after the release of The…
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Movie of the Month: Wife vs. Secretary
This month, fittingly our one year anniversary, I am starting a new blog feature. I am going to be featuring one of Clark’s films every month, as the “Movie of the Month”. In no particular order really. Hopefully it will showcase some movies that Clark fans have yet to see and will pique their interest. So, for the inaugural month, I am selecting one of my very favorites: Wife vs. Secretary, from 1936. This film is pretty much everything you would want from a fluffy 1930’s comedy/drama. The cast is stellar: Clark, Myrna Loy, Jean Harlow, May Robson and a young Jimmy Stewart in a supporting role. 1936 begins what I…
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Gossip Friday: Harlow’s Fans
Here’s some gossip on one of Clark’s favorite leading ladies, the legendary Jean Harlow, from May 1935: It was a shock to discover, through the accurate records of Mrs. Ethel Webb, Jean Harlow’s efficient secretary, that in 1933 twenty-five percent of all Miss Harlow’s fan mail came from men, while the other seventy-five percent was dashed off by feminine hands. In 1934 the ratio was twenty percent to eighty. Having labored under the conviction that the Harlow appeal was, of all the stars in Hollywood, most evidently for males, the only explanation I could offer for the feminine pre-ponderance of interest was that most men are inept correspondents. But Mrs.…