Number ten of the 14 features Myrna Loy and William Powell made together, Love Crazy never quite achieves classic status, though all the elements are here – smart writing, brilliant playing, fantastic support players. All that’s needed is a plot that makes some sense.
It’s a “remarriage comedy”, the genre that emerged once Hollywood’s production code took hold in the early 1930s and consigned straight-up sex comedies between non-marrieds to purgatory. Here, Powell and Loy play a married couple whose rock-solid marriage is shaken to the core by events which if anyone on screen had stopped for a minute to explain themselves would have elicited an “Oh, I see,” and brought the film to a very early finish.
Instead, thanks to contrivance on contrivance, Steve (Powell) gets himself into one pickle after another – starting with new next-door neighbour and old flame Isobel and winding up in an insane asylum. Steve has willingly gone there because he sees it as the only way to save a marriage that’s otherwise heading for a swift divorce. Why? You don’t need to know, and in any case it doesn’t stand up to any sort of scrutiny but it does at least explain the title.
So, pre-disruption Loy and Powell play the sort of happy, wise-cracking, charming couple familiar from The Thin Man – with less alcohol, but still enough to act as a callout to the fans. Post-disruption he’s trying to prove to the men in white coats that he’s not mad after all (don’t ask) and she’s being wooed by a character played by Jack Carson, one of the go-to men of the era when the script called for a potential love interest who’s going to get thwarted in the home straight.
Other notables include matronly Florence Bates as wife Susan’s gimlet-eyed mother, who’s never really liked her daughter’s choice of husband. And slinky and dangerous Gail Patrick as the vampish old flame of Steve’s who caused all the trouble in the first place.
I’ve already said the plot makes no sense but it really makes no sense. And as the film goes on it winds itself further and further into the realms of the ridiculous (and not in a good way). But there are other things wrong here. For one, Myrna Loy starts to disappear from the film once Steve is admitted to the asylum, removing about 50 per cent of the reason for watching a Powell and Loy film in the first place. She returns later, as if everyone concerned had realised their mistake.
On top of that the comedy shifts from the verbal to the physical, and though both stars can do whatever they want and still be entertaining, Loy and Powell are world class as quipsters. The moment that Powell ends up in women’s clothes, playing the sister no one knew he had, is the moment when the sound of a barrel being scraped becomes deafening.
Superficially it’s a screwball farce built on mistaken identities and superficially everything is here, including a decent director in Jack Conway, who does streamlined service in the MGM house style.
The film got good reviews when it was released. Variety said the “pair take advantage of every opportunity to create maximum of laughs” with the film a “standout laugh hit of top proportions.” Rottentomatoes says 100% fresh. So maybe it just caught me on a bad day, though I have to say that any opportunity to watch Loy and Powell together usually has me rubbing my hands. Oh well. Next!
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
