"Them things don't mix with those things". This was Jamie Barlow's(Joan Crawford) final excuse for again turning down dandy Todd Newton's(Franchot Tone) latest marriage proposal, leaving the door wide open to complete her long simmering chase of hard to get musical show director Patch Gallagar(Clark Gable). Her point was that, as a former downtown burlesque dancer, she wouldn't feel comfortable nor fulfilled as the ornament of a filthy rich high society scion. She wanted to continue her dancing career for an indefinite period. Although this film was included in my Clark Gable Signature Collection, as the title and credit order suggest, Joan Crawford was considered the primary star. In large part, it turned out to be semi-autobiographical. Crawford was primarily a dancer in her silent era show business career. Franchot Tone, frustrated in his pursuit of Crawford in this film, managed to get a marriage license out of her a few years later. But the marriage failed within a few years, partly because of their different backgrounds and preferred lifestyles. Tone was, in fact, a Yankee blue blood, as portrayed in this film. Although never including Gable among her 5 husbands, the two apparently were occasional lovers until his death.
The sequence where Crawford pursues Gable wherever he goes for some days, and he refuses to even give her a verbal brush off, may simply serve to burlesque the strength of her ambition to join his troop and his fear of harassment by girls wanting a position in his show. However, I get the impression that Gable instinctively knows at first sight that she is potential romantic dynamite for him, and doesn't want to get involved at this time. The give and take between Crawford and Gable, and between Crawford and Tone, dominates the middle portion of the film. It's clear Crawford's huge expressive eyes are hard to resist. But she's very stingy in dishing out her hard core romantic responses, even to an always smiling debonair Tone, who bailed her out of jail and got her started with Gable's dance outfit
The show, in its final form, is an extravaganza, featuring Crawford and newcomer Fred Astaire as dancing and singing partners in several numbers. In Busby Berkeley style, it begins as a believable stage production, then escalates into several surreal sequences which could only be produced by cinematic processes, with occasional returns to stage musical sets. Among the surreal sequences, we see Crawford and Astaire float up and down on a saucer-like magic carpet, while dancing. In another sequence, various people in archaic dress and modes of transport are magically transformed into modern dress and fashionable transport as they emerge from behind an archway. The most visually complex surreal set features a carousel in which the horses and chorus girl riders are both floor and ceiling mirrored and shadowed in the background. In addition, a cone-shaped rotating kaleidoscopic structure emerges skyward from the center of the carousel, studded with chorus girls who appear and disappear with rotation. All this would have been even more impressive if it were shot in color. Perhaps a colorized version will be made some day.
Nelson Eddy, in only his second cameo appearance in film, dominates the vocals in part of the final show scene. Already, it's clear he will probably become a major film singer. Earlier in the film, Art Jarrett sings his hit "Everything I Have is Yours". Vaudevillian Ted Healy has much screen time as Gable's dance assistant. His 3 Stooges appear briefly from time to time as wacky prop men. You'll never see them again in an Astaire or Gable film! Too bad they couldn't cut out their slapping and poking each other and been cast as a comedic element of otherwise musical or drama-dominated films.
The current DVD also includes two shorts: "Plane Nuts" and "Roast Beef and Movies", that include one or all of the Stooges plus some Busby Berkeley-like chorus girl routines.
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