Welcome back to the Oscar Film Journal here at Enuffa.com, where I'm slowly chipping away at the 280-something Best Picture nominees I haven't seen....
We're back in the 1930s with a romantic comedy called Libeled Lady, starring a pair of actors who were considered America's sweethearts back in the day, William Powell and Myrna Loy, plus Spencer Tracy and Jean Harlow. Powell and Loy starred in 13 films together, two of them in the year 1936, both nominated for Best Picture. This particular film is about wealthy heiress Connie Allenbury (Loy), falsely accused by a newspaper of breaking up a marriage. In retaliation she sues the paper, whose workaholic managing editor Warren Haggerty (Tracy) concocts a plan to stage an actual scandal in which to catch her, thus rendering the lawsuit easily dismissed. Haggerty enlists his friend, former reporter Bill Chandler, to get married on paper to his own fiancée Gladys (Harlow) and then seduce Connie so Gladys can publicly discover the "affair." But things don't go as planned, first because Connie initially doesn't show much interest in Bill, and later because the two of them actually start to fall in love.
Libeled Lady is a borderline screwball comedy, with lots of rapid-fire dialogue that's delivered so relentlessly I found it tough to keep up with at first. The premise feels like the sort of thing you'd find on a sitcom, with multiple characters having to keep up a deception of some kind, resulting in the inevitable blowing up. The heart of the film is the chemistry between Powell and Loy, who first became stars in Manhattan Melodrama and then in the Thin Man series. Both of them have an easy charm to them, while Tracy is sort of the de facto villain and Harlow is over the top in her incessant griping. I found the setup somewhat intriguing in that there was no way to know how it would turn out other than the two leads obviously falling for each other. Unfortunately the payoff came up a little short for me and the film's final scene felt abrupt and truncated. The screenwriters also let Bill off the hook a little to easily once the deception was over.
It seems an odd choice for a Best Pic nominee, particularly since it wasn't nominated for anything else and since Powell and Loy had a much more successful and acclaimed film that year in The Great Ziegfeld. Just one of those lower-echelon nominees I guess; a cute little romp without much rewatch value.
I'll be generous and give the film *** out of ****.
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