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Saturday, April 4, 2020

GALLANT LADY (1933)

Suicidal after seeing her aviator lover (and secret fiancé) crash & burn on takeoff, a pregnant & despairing Ann Harding is saved from a solicitation charge by park habitué Clive Brook, a dipsomaniac doctor who lost his license after a merciful bit of euthanasia. And before the first reel ends, Ann will have tearfully seen her baby adopted by a nice, wealthy couple. But when adoptive Mom dies, adoptive Dad (Otto Kruger) is so busy at work he doesn’t notice how much his chilly, new fiancée loathes the kid. Thank goodness Ann bumps into this long lost son on a business trip to Paris. (You see, Ann’s found success as an interior decorator thanks to an old connection from peripatetic Brook, now bumming around the world as a cattle doctor.) If only Ann can metaphorically push putative bride in front of a putative bus and convince Kruger she’s the gal for him. Only problem . . . she’s fallen for this nice guy for real and cannot tell him a lie . . . even to save her own child (adorably played by Dickie Moore). How screenwriters must miss the shame of unwed mothers as plot generator! Ridiculous as this all is, it plays like a dream under Gregory La Cava’s solid direction with Harding at her most glamorous & Brook at his most impenetrable/imperturbable. It’s all absurdly irresistible.

DOUBLE-BILL/ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Lovely and talented, Harding slipped off Hollywood’s radar toward the end of the ‘30s, returning after five years, no longer a leading lady, but a mature player. See her hold her own vis-à-vis Katharine Hepburn in an earlier version of HOLIDAY/’30 or it’s sort-of sequel THE ANIMAL KINGDOM/’32, both with Myrna Loy as fascinating adversary.

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