Provocative little Warners B that seems to enjoy playing with sexual mores, and presenting an unusually strong leading-lady character. That's Kay Francis, stalking around in high fashion and playing a driven magazine-editor lady, much like Liza Elliott in "Lady in the Dark." She hires a lowly but ambitious (and Harvard grad) David Manners as secretary, cueing the male-secretary jokes, and he's too much of a gentleman to admit to her or himself that he's falling in love with her. Which is a disaster, because, with plot knots that could never survive the Production Code, she's married to rich-but-worthless Kenneth Thomson, and he's engaged to demanding-and-annoying Una Merkel. The script merrily untangles the knots by making little to no judgment on Thomson's philandering, and suggesting that out-of-wedlock relations are just fine, as long as they result in divorce and marriage to the right partner. Manners is, as always, gentlemanly and photogenic (and Gregg Toland's photography makes the most of both the leading players), and the story has a nice feminist bent to it--it never castigates Francis for wandering far afield of expected feminine subservience, though it does eventually suggest that she and Manners will exist as equals, not dominating-woman-passive-man. It's pleasant, swift-moving pre-Code, capably directed by William Dieterle and very nice to look at.
Review of Man Wanted
