PERSONAL PROPERTY (1937)

Jean Harlow’s last completed film is flimsy stuff. A B’way fizzle with Leslie Banks, it means to delight with glamour stars playing down to the hoi polloi: Robert Taylor (in the Banks role) barking like a dog to cover a phone conversation; Harlow guying it up imitating a stuffy British Lord are the comic highlights. But why blame them and not everyone in front & behind the camera? The gimmick has Harlow, a cash-strapped ‘rich’ widow in London, held by a ‘writ,’ and Taylor, fresh out of jail for selling a car he didn’t own, wangling a position overseeing her possessions from inside her townhouse. Stuck together until she can pay the bill, he winds up playing Butler while she entertains fiancé Reginald Owen (& Co.), unaware Taylor’s the guy’s kid brother. (And both sides unaware they’d be marrying into debt.) High comedy was hardly W. S. Van Dyke's directorial forte, his rough-and-ready pace from THIN MAN & Jeanette MacDonald vehicles useless here. Only cinematographer William Daniels shines. Not so much with Harlow who looks different in almost every shot (signs of the peritonitis that killed her @ 26 three months after this opened?), but in glorifying the brief youthful prime of Robert Taylor. Least well-remembered of all the great stars (and under contract @ M-G-M longer than any of ‘em), for once you can see what all the fuss was about . . . at least physically.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Taylor, whose star rose very fast, was such a looker, the inevitable ‘powder puff’ rumors soon cropped up. (He’d been brought in the very year Ramon Novarro was dropped on a tide of similar gossip.) Hence this film’s bathtub scene with prominent attention to the manly hair on Taylor’s glistening chest.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Harlow is charming, funny, sexy, the whole package (against Spencer Tracy, real-life fiancé William Powell & wonderful Myrna Loy) in her previous release LIBELED LADY/’36.