Saratoga

Clark Gable, Cliff Edwards, and Jean Harlow

Jack Conway's Saratoga, released in 1937, is a truncated and ghoulish romantic comedy set amidst the horsey set. It was Jean Harlow's final film. Harlow collapsed on set and died soon after of renal failure, the remnants of a childhood brush with scarlet fever. She was 26. MGM was left with an unfinished film. Rather than recast Harlow's part, Conway had to use a stand-in who he shot from the back or obscures with a ridiculously large hat. This certainly casts a pall on the proceedings during the final third of the picture. The studio was ultimately rewarded though, as Saratoga proved to be the top box office attraction of its year. The public's love of the young star was fervent and undiminished.   

I'm not convinced that Saratoga would have been a good film even if Harlow had survived. She plays Carol Clayton, a scion of a northern New York racing family who has been partying it up on the continent, winding up engaged to a rich Manhattan broker played by Walter Pidgeon. Carol has taken on hoity-toity air, which is anathema to the joyfully vulgar Harlow. The role is that of the spoiled heiress who needs to be taken down a peg. In other words, Katherine Hepburn or Claudette Colbert not Harlow. The stud taking her down is her usual MGM co-star Clark Gable playing a bookie named Duke Bradley, a role that fits his bonhomie like a moleskin glove. The only time the film takes off is when Gable, Cliff Edwards (who sang under the moniker of Ukulele Ike), Una Merkle, and Hattie McDaniel trade verses on "The Horse with the Dreamy Eyes" while on a train bound for the Florida race season. This musical scene takes advantage of Gable's everyman charm much like the  bus singing of "The Man on the Flying Trapeze" does in It Happened One Night.

Too much of Saratoga is set amongst rich swells, not the flea-bitten denizens of the horse racing world. Cedric Gibbons tony sets are nifty, but Conway uses them to little advantage. Pidgeon has a thankless part. Lionel Barrymore plays his typical codger to little effect. Similarly, Frank Morgan is wasted in the one joke role of a cold-cream tycoon allergic to horses. However, his consumption of spirits is convincing. Margaret Hamilton has a nice bitchy moment or two in an uncredited role. Overall, though, Saratoga is more unsettling than entertaining.

Jack Conway, Harlow and Gable