Ideally, whenever I decide to watch films for something like "Battle of the Blondes" or "Summer Under the Stars," I'll get to watch films I've never seen before, but that's more difficult with something as restricted as "Battle of the Blondes" (two films per actress, versus the roughly ten to choose from for each actor in Summer Under the Stars), so I guess it's pretty fortunate that it took me until the fifth round of BotB to either have to rewatch a film or skip the respective actress entirely. As it turned out, I had to rewatch a film for each of the two actresses featured: I had already seen both of TCM's choices for Carole Lombard (Nothing Sacred; To Be or Not to Be), as well as both of their picks for Mae West (She Done Him Wrong; I'm No Angel).
I went with Nothing Sacred for Lombard mostly because it had been longer since I'd seen it than To Be or Not to Be, but also because it's unusual in the Lombard canon in that it was her only film shot in color, and as such, looks pretty crappy compared to her other films, color photography not being as good in 1937 as it was even two years later with 1939's Gone with the Wind. I had heard somewhere (maybe a TCM promo?) that the version of Nothing Sacred they were showing for BotB had been remastered, and so a big part of why I chose to watch it again was in the hopes that it would be less blurry than it was the last time I watched it, and it was -- I guess -- but not so much that it merited a second viewing (the picture of Lombard to the right is from Nothing Sacred; she looks beautiful, but the colors are also unnatural enough to make her look a little like a J.C. Leyendecker print.)Fortunately, Nothing Sacred does bear a second viewing because of how good it is, and how perfectly it demonstrates Lombard's talents as an actress and a comedian. Lombard plays Hazel Flagg, a small town Vermont girl who pretends to have radiation poisoning in order to nab a trip to New York City, where a newspaperman (Fredric March) who's already in trouble for trying to pass off a shoe shiner as an African king takes her on a whirlwind sympathy tour and turns her into a tragic heroine. As the title suggests, nothing is sacred in this satirical comedy, where terminal illness, suicide, and the morbid fascination people have for misfortune in others are all played for laughs, down to the ridiculous "Great Women of History" show put on by a ritzy club in Hazel's honor. Lombard and March are at their most charming playing basically selfish people who fall in love through their mutual deceptions, and the scene in which they exchange punches to the face in an attempt to make Hazel appear as if she's truly sick is no less endearing than when they embrace at the film's conclusion.
For Mae West, I chose to rewatch She Done Him Wrong, since it had been years since I had seen it (eight, I think), versus a matter of months since I had seen I'm No Angel. West adapted She Done Him Wrong from her stage play Diamond Lil, and she dominates the film, doing her by-now familiar Mae West thing and giving her costars, who include Gilbert Roland and a very young Cary Grant, little to do except make references to her when she's not on-screen. The story is thin -- West plays a Gay Nineties' saloon singer who loves men almost as much as she loves her diamonds -- and is basically a vehicle for West's best one-liners and winking innuendos. Unlike Marilyn Monroe, I feel confidant in saying that if you think you know something about Mae West without seeing any of her films, you probably do, and watching She Done Him Wrong isn't going to change your opinion very much.
I don't actually dislike Mae West, but while I can appreciate her contributions to screenwriting and film history in general, I have rarely found her films anything more than mildly amusing, and sometimes downright irritating. Admittedly, I've only seen She Done Him Wrong and I'm No Angel, as TCM seems to never want to air any of her other films (of which there aren't many), but in those two films she is never not "Mae West," that perpetually pre-orgasmic caricature who walks like she can neither breathe nor move in her clothes and never passes up an opportunity to leer at a man. She represents sex, but she never has sex, and while she talks a good talk about feminine independence, her characters aren't exactly independent, either. I also don't appreciate the way she always makes sure to paint herself as the Most Awesome of All Awesome Characters at all times, and, in that same vein, has scenes in both She Done Him Wrong and I'm No Angel where her black maid basically says, in the most stereotypical, antebellum dialect possible, "Ooh, I sure does like working for you, Miss _____, yes I does!" Literal slavery aside, how is that not as racist as anything in Gone with the Wind?
Lombard and West were an interesting pair to match up, because while they were both glamorous screen comediennes during the thirties, their respective styles of comedy were very different, just as they were very different. West was pure platinum blond vaudeville; Lombard was a screwball heroine. A more apt pairing might have been to combine this showdown with the third round of BotB and pit Mae West against Jean Harlow, while using Carole Lombard as a partner for Judy Holliday, whose Born Yesterday would have made an excellent counterpoint to Nothing Sacred. Now those would have been two battles worth watching.
Nothing Sacred: A
She Done Him Wrong: B-
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