Ah, romantic comedies, possibly the biggest entertainment gambles I take. Those from the '30s may be my biggest of all, equally likely to live up to their reputation as classics or fall flat from severe dating. Still a better track record than popular modern comedies for me.
I probably should have noted in advance that director William Wellman is much better known for serious fare. You might well have assumed from the title that this movie would be serious too, and the premises do have a bit of darkness to them: A woman (Carole Lombard) diagnosed with radium poisoning gets a reporter's (Fredric March) seemingly sympathetic attention, followed by the general public's. In truth, according to the cynical reporter as the apparent main point, various people are just capitalizing on the sob story and won't remember her long. The comic part? She just discovered it was a drunken misdiagnosis but wants to use her celebrity status to leave her podunk town for NYC for a while. Not so easy to enjoy when she has to figure out how to escape the expectation of imminent death without angering millions and dragging the beloved reporter down with her.
A little seriousness often helps to highlight humor, but you have to be careful with the balance. Personally, I find it hard to laugh at Lombard's powerful, if at times overdone, evocation of guilty misery. March mainly just comes across as quietly bitter, which can make him something of a foil or simply inspire one to feel as annoyed at the world as he does.
Also a delicate balance is the matter of exaggeration: Too little and the audience will dismiss it as too real to be funny; too much and they'll find it too unreal to be funny. I thought NS had both problems in alternation. The excess came in the form of personalities who wouldn't feel out of place in a contemporary Warner Bros. cartoon (no, it's not a Warner movie), including some cultural caricatures that don't fly so well nowadays.
The handling of romance might be the aspect I remember most later, for better or worse. Oh, there's no compelling reason for love to strike the protagonists, especially when he doesn't even falter after finding out she was lying. But the ironic dynamics thereafter get pretty interesting, as hinted by the poster with pugilistic poses. Does it get sexist? Undecided.
NS has its major fans. I'm not one of them. Would I have become one if I'd seen it in the right mood? I'd sooner blame the unpredictable nature of our individual senses of humor. My advice: Take a chance on it only if your taste is at least as old-fashioned as mine. (That ought to rule out quite a few of you.)
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