THREE WISE GIRLS (1931)

Seven writing credits your first year in Hollywood is no small achievement.  Especially when two were for Frank Capra and the other five made you go-to scrivener for Columbia Pictures boss Harry Cohn.  So while it’s no surprise this little programer flew under the radar, hidden under William Beaudine’s unexceptional megging, it’s an unusually interesting, if misnamed, early work.  The title makes it sound like one of those three roommates on the hunt for Mr. Right tales of the city (like THE GREEKS HAD A WORD FOR IT or HOW TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE), and that’s half right.  But Riskin’s likely working title, BEHIND THE EIGHT BALL, mentioned half a dozen times, fills in the rest.  As salon model Mae Clarke explains to Jean Harlow, her small-town friend new to big city ways, Behind the Eight Ball is the position she’s stuck in as mistress to a married man promising divorce.  Sure enough, Harlow ends up repeating the pattern while her roommate pal, delicious Marie Prevost, more promisingly casts her eye on the rich guy’s chauffeur.  Riskin telegraphs his plot turns, but the playing still looks fresh & honest.  And what’s up with Harlow?  Suddenly, after looking like a miscast amateur she can act!  Even getting to show some of her own non-trampy/non-vampy actual personality.  Still a ‘dish,’ but a nice dish; shapely, sharp, and with a defensive antennae able to spot putative passes before they occur.  Harlow wouldn’t hit the bull’s eye till Anita Loos nailed her signature tough comic persona in M-G-M’s RED-HEADED WOMAN next year*, but her personality is already popping right thru the camera lens.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: The married guy who takes up with Harlow, Walter Byron, never quite broke thru. But he grows on you and, in a pact with his amicable wife, Riskin briefly lands on the best idea in the film: friendly if incompatible husband & wife who’ve agreed to keep each other from making another marital mistake by refusing to grant a divorce.  Now there’s a story idea to run with.  Maybe for THE AWFUL TRUTH's Leo McCarey.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Harlow finds her true cinematic voice in RED-HEADED WOMAN/’32.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/04/red-headed-woman-1932.html