Clarence Brown by Gwenda Young

Author:Gwenda Young
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2018-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

19

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Wife vs. Secretary, The Gorgeous Hussy, and Love on the Run

When Brown left Grafton, Massachusetts, in the fall of 1935, it was with a sense of satisfaction at a job well done. The warm reception that greeted Ah Wilderness! among both studio bosses and critics seemed to prove that personal films could be successful. But Brown’s hopes that he would be allowed to continue in this vein for his next assignments were dashed when he was drafted to direct a “sex comedy” featuring MGM’s top stars.

The very idea of a sex comedy produced during the mid-1930s, with the production code fully in effect, may seem like an impossibility, but a deft director could insinuate risqué content, and talented performers could convey desire, perversity, and naughtiness (the twinkle in Charles Laughton’s eye in The Barretts of Wimpole Street being a case in point). In the case of Jean Harlow, however, her sexy appearance was enough to concern the censors, and it was becoming clear to MGM that both her movies and her wardrobe would need some revisions. The “new” Harlow was showcased in Wife vs. Secretary, in which she plays Whitey, a serious and ambitious secretary whose natural good looks attract catty comments from women and cause the boss’s wife to doubt her husband’s faithfulness. The film’s unique selling point was the reversal of roles: there would be no need for Harlow to arch her famous eyebrows as she delivered sardonic lines, because she had none, and her trademark platinum blonde hair was dyed a mousey brown to complement her dowdy costumes. Playing the “sexy” (or sexier) role of Linda, the wife, was Myrna Loy (who was returning to MGM after a suspension). Linda spends her time lounging around in a succession of sophisticated outfits, waiting for her husband to return from the office. The role was not far from the part of Nora in The Thin Man, and in a further nod to the W. S. van Dyke film, MGM planned to cast William Powell as the husband. When scheduling conflicts made that impossible, Clark Gable was assigned. He was joined by a young James Stewart as Harlow’s ardent but unglamorous boyfriend, Dave.

Studios often presented the Breen office with scripts that included deliberately provocative content, hoping to distract from the subtler innuendos, but in the case of Wife vs. Secretary, a trio of writers—Norman Krasna, John Lee Mahin, and Alice Duer Miller—came up with a script that contained little to provoke Breen. Nevertheless, he and his staff combed through it, attempting to identify anything that might have a sexual meaning or any implication that Whitey provided her boss with more than secretarial services. He found nothing and offered only preemptive warnings that a bathroom scene should not include a glimpse of the toilet, and there should be no repeat of the Gable “torso shot” in Columbia’s It Happened One Night, which had caused such a furor a few months before (Breen directed: “put an undershirt on him [Gable]”).

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