Bombshell

Jean Harlow and Lee Tracy

Victor Fleming's Bombshell, released by MGM in 1933, is a lively comedy, part Hollywood satire, part antic screwball. Michael Sragow's excellent biography of Fleming gives a good précis of its genesis. Bombshell was based on a play about an actress beset by the perils of stardom that ends with a tragic suicide. Thankfully, Fleming and producer Hunt Stromberg wanted to shift the material's tone and concoct a vehicle for Jean Harlow who had collaborated with Fleming on Red Dust, a hit the previous year. What emerged was a boisterous comedy with the ratatat dialogue of The Front Page. Jules Furthman wrote a first draft, then frequent Fleming collaborator John Lee Mahin, a protege of Ben Hecht's, took a whack at it. When Lee Tracy replaced John Gilbert (thankfully) in the co-lead role of a wisecracking press agent, Norma Krasna was brought into beef up his part.

Tracy had played the part of Walter Burns in the smash Broadway production of The Front Page and is a perfect fit for the cynical flak monikered Space Hanlon. In general, Bombshell succeeds because it was concocted expressly for its crack cast. Mahin, who was Fleming's closest friend, knew of Clara Bow's romance with Fleming and used that for fodder. However, Bombshell is even more about Harlow and her persona. The opening montage presents Harlow under the guise of Lola Burns as a product of the star making machinery of her studio which makes her a target to be brought down by the tabloids. This was as true for Harlow as it was for Bow. Both women were perpetually linked with scandal once they attained fame. Both starlets also had family members who leeched from them along with the usual Hollywood hangers-on who inflict themselves on film icons to this day; like the Church of Scientology. These weasels bear the brunt of the satire in Bombshell including an underused Una Merkel as Lola's Gal Friday, Ted Healy as her degenerate gambler brother, and Frank Morgan as a pixillated papa. They are all excellent and superbly cast, but the amount of unrepentant drunkards (Morgan, Tracy, and Mahin were all eminent tankard-men) on this flick is startling.

Pat O'Brien, the onscreen Walter Burns of 1931, plays a director named Jim Brogan who is a virtual stand-in for Fleming. Brogan and Lola have a romantic past, just like Fleming and Bow, and are giving each other the eye through the picture. Fleming even has O'Brien and Harlow recreate the bath in a barrel sequence from Red Dust for old time's sake. How post-modern! Lola always has a bevy of potential lovers hounding her during the course of the picture including Brogan, Ivan Lebedeff as a foreign aristocrat of dubious provenance (Hollywood had a lot of those in its early days), and Franchot Tone as a preppy scion. Nobody in Bombshell, however, is who they seem. The biggest four flusher of them all is Space, Lola's true twin and nemesis. Whenever Lola is about to have a tryst or a meeting with a respectable personage, like a reporter from the Women's Home Companion or some biddies from an adoption league, Space sabotages her plans by calling in favors from the police or the press or both. All heck breaks loose in the foyer and Temperance League members brush shoulders with tipplers and other oddballs. Humanity in all its screwball glory is unleashed.

Some have cited Bombshell as the first screwball comedy, but this is not so. There are plenty of other films from this period (like Three-Cornered Moon) and even earlier, like The Coconuts, that equally fit that rubric. Certainly, the anarchic antics of the Marx brothers and other vaudevillians brought a new energy to the American sound film. I think the genre really got its start with Oscar Wilde whose work poked fun and eventually upended the conventions of the drawing room comedy. This cocking a snoot at convention and the screwball's embrace of the common man made it very audience friendly to a beleagured American in the Depression.

Every little character role in Bombshell is perfectly cast and delivered. Of those I haven't mentioned, there are plum bits by Louise Beavers, Isabel Jewell, Leonard Carey, and C. Aubrey Smith. Fleming gives the action flow, it moves but not haphazardly. A flood of innocent merriment is always threatening to burst. It is this feel of fluid spontaneity that help Harlow and Tracy give their best film performances. The picture is also greatly helped by the expert editing of Margaret Booth. She emulates the frisky rhythms Fleming finds in his choral scenes giving the film a burbling and winning perkiness. I find the last reel of the film a bit mechanical, but the self-mocking tone of the dialogue is a continuous delight. Franchot Tone manages to keep a straight face while telling Harlow, "Your heart is like a gardenia open to the sun." Harlow intones "You might get leprosy or something" with just the right amount of emphasis on the last two words. A fun flick.