Hold Your Man

*******SPOILERS INCLUDED***********

I finally got sit down and watch Hold Your Man. I've been wanting to see this movie since I first heard of it, in highschool! I remember asking to inter-library loan it at our local library, and they weren't able to find a VHS copy of it. It was difficult to find on DVD for a long time too, because there's not much demand for little-known pre-code films to be transferred onto various types of media, each time a new format becomes popular. 

I am guessing that streaming video is making these types of old movies easier to find and view, and I hope that it is also giving them a renaissance by allowing more viewers to discover them, but maybe that's too optimistic of me.

Anyways, Hold Your Man is another film that pairs the King of Hollywood with Jean Harlow. I've always liked their on screen chemistry. Clark Gable (pre-mustache) and Harlow always seemed like two puzzle pieces that fit together. He usually played a gangster or conman, and she was never duped by his crooked smile and smooth words, playing more than a few tricks of her own. Harlow oozed sensuality, with her bedroom eyes and her filmy dresses and satin robes, and she often played a character who is well-known to more than a few men, but because of her cherubic face, viewers know there's more heart to her than she lets on. Despite her bleached blonde hair and her pencil-thin eyebrows, she still managed to look innocent and vulnerable, that is, when she wasn't a wise-cracking tough cookie.

The first moment she appears on screen, she's in the bathtub.  Conman Eddie Hall (Gable) busts into her apartment as he's evading some policemen. 

She screams and covers herself, emerging a moment later in a black satin robe. In just that introduction, the pre-code characteristics of the film are evident: the audience catches a glimpse of her bare body, and afterwards she allows him to change clothes in her apartment, after they've only known each other for five minutes. She hands him a robe from her closet and he remarks "Hey, this a man's robe!" In 1933, an unmarried lady would not have had a man's robe in her home.  .  .unless she was more like a Lady of the Night.  .  .and she also would not have had numerous photos of other men hung up in her bedroom.

She also would not be chatting casually with a shirtless criminal, as she wears nothing but a satin bathrobe, in her bathroom.

One of my favorite things about watching classic films is how I am able to interpret history through the story's lens.

For example, in the beginning of the film,  conman Eddie is lamenting a scam that wasn't as lucrative as he'd hoped, and his buddy says "What a waste of a Depression- you can't tell a banker from a bum", which isn't difficult to figure out, given the 1933 setting.

Furthermore, after Ruby (Harlow) is sent to a women's reformatory, one of her roommates begins ranting about the brokenness of a social class system, saying "We don't do anything that debutantes don't do, but you don't see them in here", and one of them women calmly explains "She's a communist."

Communists were kind of a self-contained group, but the Great Depression led to an increase in enrollment for this political party, as many people wondered how an economy that was so prosperous in the previous decade was now failing them. Later, when this woman's sewing machine breaks down, she rants again that "all machines are broken", and declares that machines are responsible for the Great Depression.

While in the reformatory, Ruby discovers that she's pregnant. This is a HUGE pre-code indicator, because Ruby is not married yet. 

The film takes its title from a song that's played throughout the story. Here's a clip of Jean Harlow singing it:

Something I particularly enjoyed about the story is that the preacher who marries Eddie and Ruby is black, and Eddie expresses his gratitude and appreciation for the man's kindness. Clark Gable never understood the division of people based on skin color. As a child growing up in Ohio, he was known to play baseball with any boy. When I visited the Clark Gable birthplace and museum a couple years ago, the guide told a story that he and some friends hitchhiked on a train to play a game with another group of boys in a neighboring town. When they arrived, the boys they met said they wouldn't play ball with blacks, so they just got right back on the train and headed home again, rather than leave out anyone.

Gable also made his disgust known over the Academy's rules, when Hattie McDaniel, the first black woman to receive an Academy Award, was not allowed to sit at the table with her co-stars, but had to sit alone at a table in the back of the room. Even that had been a compromise, since the nightclub had a strict no-blacks policy. Gable had wanted to boycott the ceremony and not attend, but McDaniel asked him to go, for her.

The story moves along quickly, and it has a happy ending. I would watch it again