Ladies' Man
At one point in Lothar Mendes’ LADIES’ MAN (1931), William Powell takes Kay Frances onto the balcony of his posh New York penthouse to watch the sunrise. The two stars, immaculately dressed by Travis Banton, stand in front of a painted backdrop with a little hole from which a chimney belches smoke, and it’s just about the realest thing in this strange little pre-Code drama. That wouldn’t be a problem if the film were an inspired work of make believe, but it isn’t. Powell is a kept man romancing a married society woman (Olive Tell) and her daughter (Carole Lombard) at the same time when he meets and falls hard for Frances, a wealthy out-of-towner. Their scenes together are charming, and even this early in her career, Frances is warm and natural, much better than the material deserves. She even brings out the best in Powell, who’d yet to find his niche as a devil-may-care sophisticate. His sophisticate here cares and shows it in all the wrong ways. Instead of letting him swill in his life of ill-gotten luxury, Herman J. Mankiewicz’ script (not one of his best) has him increasingly torn over his sinful ways, which means he delivers his lines more and more slowly. Maybe that played in Depression-era America, where audiences struggling to pay the rent wanted to think that money really made people miserable. In this case, however, it makes them boring. This is an early talkie, and a lot of the acting is still hopelessly phony. Poor Lombard only comes to life in one flirting scene and a later drunk scene. The rest of the time, she’s flat and heavy-handed. It’s acting as demonstrating. Mendes gets in a few decent touches: a nice tracking shot, a negotiation through objects over a bracelet Tell gives Powell in payment for his services and a final shot that points up the film’s social commentary better than does the script. This is not, however, the kind of pre-Code film that anybody would be excited to discover.
