For decades I thought of this film as the one in which Clark Gable famously slaps Norma Shearer, inaugurating an era in rough loving that made women swoon at his brutality. I had read about this in numerous movie-history books and had even read that the studio was inundated with letters from women who wanted Gable to slap them. Well, nothing of the sort. Gable gently shoves Shearer onto a sofa, but that's it. The only slap is the one Shearer gives her father (Lionel Barrymore) when he is about to call her a tramp but before he can say the word. Somehow the slap, during the decades when the film went unseen, got transferred to Gable hitting Shearer. Don't believe everything you read!
Another discovery on watching it was that much of the film is taken up not with the romance between the gangster and the Nob Hill lady but with Shearer's attempts to cure her father of alcoholism. Too much. Indeed, too much of these two altogether. Shearer, with her big nose and wonky eyes, was never a beauty, though she certainly carried on like one, with lots of arch, coy silent-movie mannerisms (head thrown back, back of hand covering face). Barrymore is, as usual, grade-B ham, getting sloppily sozzled and, when sober, full of maudlin pleas for sympathy.
The legal aspect is laughable. The evidence that acquits Gable during the trial that begins the movie is so obviously absurd that this would have been discovered long before the trial began; also, it is not sufficient to be exculpatory on its own. In the trial at the end, legal procedure is violated or ignored, as anyone who has watched an episode of Law and Order--or perhaps even Perry Mason--can tell. The movie also wants to have the title both ways. Though we are frequently told that the Shearer character is over 21 (she looks older than her real age, 29) and has been brought up to be independent, we are also supposed to feel sorry for her because her father was weak and unable to protect her. Sorry, you can have only one verdict.
Even so, the movie is well worth watching for occasionally snappy dialogue and its record of past manners and morals and for Adrian's fabulous, slinky gowns. Above all, for Gable, looking so beautiful, as he did in his other early movies, without the face fuzz. Amid all the phoniness, he is a real human being and a real man. Leslie Howard, too, is more interesting than the leads in his small and stereotypical part, making his character not merely a snobbish narrow-minded socialite but a man who is painfully and touchingly repressed.
I presume the name of Gable's gangster--Ace Wilfong--is from the Adela Rogers St. John novel on which the film is based. If so, a pity that no one had the nerve to tell her this ludicrous combination of an aviator and a Chinese laundryman showed she wasn't so au fait with San Francisco low life as she thought.
Another discovery on watching it was that much of the film is taken up not with the romance between the gangster and the Nob Hill lady but with Shearer's attempts to cure her father of alcoholism. Too much. Indeed, too much of these two altogether. Shearer, with her big nose and wonky eyes, was never a beauty, though she certainly carried on like one, with lots of arch, coy silent-movie mannerisms (head thrown back, back of hand covering face). Barrymore is, as usual, grade-B ham, getting sloppily sozzled and, when sober, full of maudlin pleas for sympathy.
The legal aspect is laughable. The evidence that acquits Gable during the trial that begins the movie is so obviously absurd that this would have been discovered long before the trial began; also, it is not sufficient to be exculpatory on its own. In the trial at the end, legal procedure is violated or ignored, as anyone who has watched an episode of Law and Order--or perhaps even Perry Mason--can tell. The movie also wants to have the title both ways. Though we are frequently told that the Shearer character is over 21 (she looks older than her real age, 29) and has been brought up to be independent, we are also supposed to feel sorry for her because her father was weak and unable to protect her. Sorry, you can have only one verdict.
Even so, the movie is well worth watching for occasionally snappy dialogue and its record of past manners and morals and for Adrian's fabulous, slinky gowns. Above all, for Gable, looking so beautiful, as he did in his other early movies, without the face fuzz. Amid all the phoniness, he is a real human being and a real man. Leslie Howard, too, is more interesting than the leads in his small and stereotypical part, making his character not merely a snobbish narrow-minded socialite but a man who is painfully and touchingly repressed.
I presume the name of Gable's gangster--Ace Wilfong--is from the Adela Rogers St. John novel on which the film is based. If so, a pity that no one had the nerve to tell her this ludicrous combination of an aviator and a Chinese laundryman showed she wasn't so au fait with San Francisco low life as she thought.