Nothing Sacred 1937 Classic Color Drama | Carole Lombard, Fredric March | Satire, screwball .comedy
Channel: Shankar Pandiath
Date: 18/03/2024

Nothing Sacred is a 1937 classic color, beautiful satirical, screwball comedy film starring Carole Lombard and Fredric March.

GENRE : Classic Color - Screwball Satirical Comedy, Drama

REVIEW:

Nothing Sacred is directed by William A. Wellman, produced by David O. Selznick, with a supporting cast featuring Charles Winninger and Walter Connolly. Ben Hecht was credited with the screenplay based on the 1937 story "Letter to the Editor" by James H. Street, and an array of additional writers, including Ring Lardner Jr., Budd Schulberg, Dorothy Parker, Sidney Howard, Moss Hart, George S. Kaufman and Robert Carson made uncredited contributions. 

March is Wally Cook, a reporter in hot water, and who goes to Vermont to hunt down a story about a woman dying of radium poisoning and finds her in the person of Hazel Flagg (Lombard). Hazel has just gotten some very bad news from her doctor (Charles Winninger), that she's not dying. The diagnosis was a mistake. She had hopes of taking a trip out of Vermont that was offered to her and asks the doctor to keep the new diagnosis of health quiet. Soon after, she meets Wally, who wants to bring her to New York for a last fling at the expense of the paper, which will follow her until her last poisoned breath. Hazel agrees and takes the doctor with her. At first, she has a blast with only the occasional twinge of guilt. Then a German specialist is brought in and blows Hazel's scam all to hell.

This story predates reality shows by something like 87 years. Hazel, like so many today, is an ersatz celebrity, famous for being famous. What will never change is milking a subject for profit until it's dry. Nothing Sacred has some hilarious scenes and great lines.

Carole Lombard (incidentally, the third wife of Clark Gable), is beautiful and wears some stunning outfits and gowns, a gift to Hazel from the newspaper. She was a very adept actress with a wonderful sense of comedy. How sad that she is in a film about dying young and would do so five years later at the age of 33, in a plane crash. She and March do a great job together - he's normally not known for his comedy but does well here. He approach to Wally is serious and he plays Wally's intensity and affection for Hazel for all it's worth. Connelly as his editor is fabulous, as is Winninger as the doctor who drinks his way through New York.

Nothing Sacred has been made into a musical, Hazel Flagg, and remade as Living it Up (with Jerry Lewis as Homer Flagg). Most recently, the general plot was reworked as Last Holiday. But no version comes close to the original 1937 screwball comedy starring Frederic March and Carole Lombard..

The difference sometimes between comedy and drama is often so slight as to be imperceptible. There's not much difference between Fredric March's character in Nothing Sacred and Kirk Douglas's in Ace in the Hole. Both are newspaper people looking for a comeback and both exploit a story to their own ends, March comically and Douglas tragically. But the plots are more similar than one realizes.

Even today we still hunger for our celebrities some of whom are nothing but professional celebrities, and Nothing Sacred provides a timeless message about the power of media to create and destroy.

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