William A Wellman (1937)
Wally Cook, a reporter on the New York Morning Star, blots his copybook when the blue-blooded African philanthropist he’s discovered is revealed to be a Harlem bootblack. Wally wasn’t party to the deception but his irate editor, Oliver Stone [sic(!)], demotes him to writing obituaries. Wally pleads successfully to be given another chance. In the fictional small town of Warsaw, Vermont, he comes across a young woman called Hazel Flagg, who is terminally ill with radium poisoning. Wally interviews Hazel. She weeps as she tells her story. Unbeknown to him, the reason for Hazel’s tears is that her doctor has told her she isn’t dying after all. That means she could be stuck in Warsaw for a long time.
Oliver Stone seizes on Hazel’s potential to increase sales of the Morning Star. The campaign turns her quickly into a national celebrity and courageous inspiration. Hazel and Wally fall in love, and he asks her to marry him, even though he believes she’s not long for this world. He’s enlightened when independent doctors examine her and pronounce Hazel in good health. Wally’s angry but not disenchanted. To avoid catastrophic fallout, Stone decides it would be better to peddle a story that Hazel has suddenly disappeared from the limelight in order to die quietly. She marries Wally and they set sail for faraway places.
Ben Hecht wrote the draft script for Nothing Sacred. Producer David Selznick thought it went too far in skewering the ‘ethics’ of journalism. After they fell out and Hecht left the project, the screenplay was handed over to a host of others – although, surprisingly in the circumstances, Hecht retained the sole writing credit on the finished picture. The uncredited contributors were all, or would become, big names too – Robert Carson, Moss Hart, Sidney Howard, George S Kaufman, Ring Lardner Jr, Dorothy Parker, Budd Schulberg. It goes without saying that William Wellman’s famous screwball comedy has sharp, smart dialogue, and plenty of it.
Reading a plot synopsis of Nothing Sacred made me smile but I watched the film with a straight face nearly throughout. For two main, and connected, reasons, I think. The satire – of unscrupulous yellow-press salesmanship, the public appetite for maudlin tragedy and the synergy between them – now seems heavy-handed. That could be because Ben Hecht had had too much target practice. He’d had fun with an outrageous tabloid editor in The Front Page, co-written by Charles MacArthur. Originally produced on the Broadway stage in 1928, the play became a Hollywood movie for the first time in 1931. Hecht worked on the screenplay for that film, as he did nine years later on His Girl Friday, which reworked the Front Page material, though he didn’t receive a credit on either of them.
What kills the humour, though, is a style of performance that compounds the problem of the overly forceful satirical writing. This is particularly the case in the main supporting roles – Walter Connolly as Stone, Charles Winninger (whose broad playing I’d enjoyed in Show Boat just a few weeks previously) as the non-doomed heroine’s doctor. When a comedy plot has so many twists and turns that the momentum is giddying, it can vindicate exaggerated acting and make it funny (as in much of Frank Capra’s You Can’t Take It with You, made a year after Nothing Sacred). When the performers work themselves up into a lather without this kind of propulsion, it’s tiresome. As directed by William Wellman, most of the cast of Nothing Sacred repeatedly calm down for just a couple of lines before whizzing back into hyperactivity.
The leads are easier to take. Carole Lombard is Hazel. As in My Man Godfrey, I found a little of her ditzy abandon went a long way but her cheerfully empathetic playing makes her character more challenging. Lombard is so far from condemning Hazel’s self-seeking duplicity that she gets you rooting for her. Thank goodness, though, for Fredric March. He can do comedy but even here he doesn’t go in for a comedy turn. He’s splendidly depressed during Wally’s brief languishing on the obits desk and makes his gullibility rather touching. The moment when Wally sees no alternative to socking Hazel on the jaw and she reciprocates is certainly the physical comedy highlight. (Selznick International and United Artists, who distributed the picture, evidently saw this: the Wikipedia article shows a theatrical release poster for Nothing Sacred done as a mock boxing promotion – ‘See the Big Fight! Lombard vs March’.) One odd feature of the film is that it’s in Technicolor – an early use of the process and extraordinary for the genre. You struggle to adjust to it. A 1930s screwball comedy that isn’t black-and-white seems denatured.
There’s a subsidiary difficulty, for 2020 viewers anyway, in the presentation of ethnic minorities and non-American characters. In these respects, Nothing Sacred is a film of its time rather than especially offensive but it does depend quite a lot on assumptions that, for example, a Scandinavian-American fireman (John Qualen) and the trio of eminent European medics who reveal Hazel’s true state of health (Sig Ruman, Alex Novinsky and Alexander Schoenberg) are bound to be hilarious whenever they open their mouths and speak English in their silly foreign accents. The idea that an African American might be a man of noble birth has to be a joke too. In the opening scene, when the African grandee is unmasked as menial Ernest Walker (Troy Brown), it’s all too apt that his wife, who does the unmasking at a grand public event, is Hattie McDaniel – in a cameo comprising all of five words, delivered with great aplomb (‘That’s him … that’s my husband!’). This is amusing but I rarely found myself suppressing inappropriate laughter: the possibility of any kind of laughter didn’t arise. At seventy-five minutes, Nothing Sacred is an unusually short feature but I was relieved when it was over.
Enjoying My Man Godfrey less than I felt I should and this film hardly at all left me worried I’d a blind spot for classic screwball. I thought I’d better check what the canon comprises. I consulted the BFI website. Their list of ’10 great screwball comedy films’ includes, as well as My Man Godfrey, Nothing Sacred and The Awful Truth, two favourites of mine – Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve and The Palm Beach Story – and other films I like (It Happened One Night and, to a lesser extent, Bringing Up Baby). Wikipedia’s longer list features Twentieth Century, also derived from a Hecht-MacArthur stage play. Fingers crossed for that one, which is next up for me in BFI’s Carole Lombard season.
10 January 2020
