When Ladies Meet
Directed by Harry Beaumont and Robert Z. Leonard
Written by John Meehan and Leon Gordon from the play by Rachel Crothers
1933/US
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
IMDb page
First viewing/Forbidden Hollywood Vol. 9
Clare: Well, the hard thing for me to believe is that she’d believe this man.
Mary Howard: Good heavens, why? A woman knows when a man’s in love.
Clare: Perhaps, I suppose any married woman would think that this other woman ought to know enough not to believe a married man if he’s making love to her.
Here’s a sophisticated love triangle/quadrangle that works very well. And possibly the last time Myrna Loy didn’t get top billing for a film.
Mary Howard (Loy) is a free-thinking young novelist. She is currently writing a book about a woman who is having an affair with a married man. Close friend Jimmie Lee (Robert Montgomery) has proposed countless times. He hates Mary’s book. As the story begins, he is being rejected once again. Mary’s publisher Rogers Woodruf (Frank Morgan) is helping her with the final chapter. It soon becomes evident that Mary is also having an affair with Rogers, a married man. She gets her friend Bridget (Alice Brady) to host her and Rogers in the country for some alone time r. None of this is lost on Jimmie.
Mary’s final chapter has the heroine determined to meet the wife before she decides whether to break up the marriage. Jimmie plots to meet and get close to Rogers’s wife Clare (Ann Harding). He tells her he wants to make Mary jealous and would like her to pose as the other woman and join him for a country weekend at Bridget’s house. It will be an awkward weekend not least because it turns out Mary likes Clare very much.
I liked this one a lot. The writing is sharp and the cast is great. It’s hard to believe anybody would reject Robert Montgomery in favor of Frank Morgan but the latter is far more appealing than the befuddled character he would specialize in later in his career. Loy appears in almost every scene while we don’t meet Harding until 30 minutes into the picture. The vamp is gone and she adopts the common-sense fun-loving persona that would be hers for the rest of her long career.
The movie would be remade in 1941 with Joan Crawford, Greer Garson, Robert Taylor and Herbert Marshall
Cedric Gibbon was nominated for the Best Art Direction Oscar.
