Nothing Sacred

Apparently, Carole Lombard specialized in getting knocked-around in her films.  In 1936, FSA photographer, Walker Evans, made a famous picture of two decrepit houses in Atlanta.  On a hoarding in front of the houses, big mural-sized advertisements have been posted for movies.  The ad in the center of the composition shows Carole Lombard sporting a black eye and smiling seductively:  the name of the movie advertised is Love before Breakfast. Nothing Sacred (directed by William Wellman) was made two years later in 1937.  Contemporary ads show the two stars, Frederic March and Carole Lombard, squaring off like professional boxers and the poster cries out:  "See the Fight!"  At the climax of Nothing Sacred, Frederick March punches Carole Lombard so hard that she is knocked-out.  But, no worries:  she revives and hits March in the jaw so hard that he's also out cold. 

Nothing Sacred is a scatter-brained screw-ball comedy, so diffuse that it almost evaporates before your eyes.  Shot in technicolor, it's a handsome film and Lombard is fantastically beautiful.  A scene in which the two beautiful stars occupy a white sailboat running upriver and posed against the Manhattan skyline is iconic:  it doesn't matter that the shot is executed in rather unconvincing rear-projection -- the intent is clear and the concept is fabulous.  Furthermore, the film is casually surrealistic and, therefore, the dream-like character of some of the imagery fits the picture's general tone.  This is a movie in which one main character is described "as a cross between a Ferris Wheel and a werewolf."  A quack doctor produces eggs from a half-dozen pockets, pierces them and urges the hungover heroine to suck out the contents.  Several important scenes are played with Lombard resplendent under a big fireman's hat.  At the end of the movie, the lovers are safely aboard a cruiser with an incandescent sunset casting a red-orange glare over all of the proceedings -- the dipsomaniacal doctor wakes up, looks out his porthole at the flaming sunset and the equally brilliant sea and cries out:  "The hotel is flooded!"  At a cabaret, the theme is "Tootsies of all Nations" and mostly naked Walkyries on horses ride out from backstage to stand in statuesque tableaux among broken columns underneath a huge chandelier.  The sets are lavish Art Deco confections with towering fluted pillars and enormous windows looking out on the skyscrapers of Manhattan.  Everything is grandiose, elegant, over-sized, acres of curtains cover walls and hotel rooms seem as large as bowling alleys.

The film's premise is a little queasy-making.  A journalist (Wally played by Frederick March) is in hot water because he promoted an Oriental potentate as a patron of the arts.  The potentate turns out to be a fraud -- a shoe-shine man from Harlem.  As punishment for his gullibility, Wally is put in the newspaper's basement where he is assigned writing obituaries.  Wally learns that a girl at a clock factory in Warsaw, Vermont is dying of cancer -- the radium used to paint the dials of the clocks is eating away her bones.  Wally finagles a trip to Vermont to meet the woman (Hazel Flagg played by Lombard) and offers her a trip to Manhattan -- the idea is that she will have a good time in the bright lights of the big city before she succumbs.  But Hazel has just discovered that she's not sick at all.  The radium isn't killing her.  Nonetheless, she wants the free trip to New York City and so, with her small-town doctor, she connives to maintain the illusion that she is dying.  (The premise makes light of a real tragedy -- the horrible deaths of many women and girls who worked painting radium on clock dials in Elgin, Illinois.  It is said that geiger counters still trigger when the graves of the dead women are approached.)  In the big city, Hazel is wined and dined and given the keys to the City.  Of course, she falls in love with Wally, the journalist who is squiring her around town.  In a misguided effort at publicity, Wally's paper brings in famous European specialists in radium poisoning to try to cure the girl.  But, of course, they discover that the celebrated and tragic young woman is not sick at all.  Hazel decides to feign suicide and flee with her corrupt and drunk small-town doctor.  She ends up in the river and has to be pulled-out by a fireman with Wally who has ineffectually jumped into the drink with her -- he can't swim.  Hazel now decides to fake her death from pneumonia and escape.  Just before she can vamoose, the famous doctors, all of them comically bearded and speaking like Bela Lugosi, appear.  Wally decides to fool the doctors into thinking that Hazel is really feverish by fighting with her -- this results in the exchange of punches that leaves both stars with swollen jaws.  The big fight scene, celebrated in the movie's posters, really adds nothing to the plot.  Hazel and Wally flee the city and we see them last on their honeymoon on a cruise ship in the tropics -- the sun is wildly orange and red that they both wear sunglasses. 

There's not much to the movie although the dialogue is consistently witty and bizarre.  The film decries tabloid journalism and the ease with which readers of this stuff are manipulated.  In fact, the trade of the journalist is identified as purveyor of fake news, an unsettling pop culture trope that haunts us today.  Wellmann, curiously enough, hides his stars in some crucial scenes -- he interposes barriers between the stars and the camera.  In an early scene set in Warsaw, Vermont, a tree limb completely hides the heads of Wally and Hazel as they discuss traveling to New York -- it's a surrealist image worthy of Magritte:  we've paid to see Lombard and March and, yet, during this crucial piece of dialogue their faces are hidden.  In another scene, March and his editor have a colloquy hidden behind huge bouquets of flowers.  A pivotal love scene is played-out in a kind of lathe packing box that entirely hides the stars.  In a later scene, Hazel is shot through the black veil of a woman who has come to denounce her.  This is part of the general surrealist ambience:  Hazel's funeral will involve 30,000 cars and a half million mourners.  In Warsaw, a feral child darts from behind a picket fence and bits Wally on the ass.  A children's choir sings a morbid tribute to Hazel scored to "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."  In a final scene, Wally says that Hazel's plight will be forgotten:  "You were just another freak like the Bearded Lady or Jojo, the dog-faced boy."