Lombard had been in films since she was a teenager. When a car accident at 17 left her face scarred, her leading lady roles stopped and she spent some time working for comedy legend Mack Sennett as one of his bathing beauties and as an extra in his late 1920s campus comedies. She later claimed this was where she developed her flair for comedy. When her scars healed, Lombard went back to playing leading ladies in mostly mediocre dramas until she costarred with John Barrymore in Twentieth Century (1934). In that film, Lombard was finally able to express her own real-life screwball persona, which although well-known in Hollywood, had not been given a chance to shine on the screen. As a follow-up, MGM borrowed Lombard from her home studio Paramount for a comedy called The Gay Bride which was a professional disappointment for her and a difficult role to complete.
The film, originally titled Repeal (to capitalize on the repeal of Prohibition the year before) revolved around professional gold digger Mary (Lombard) who marries and is made a rich widow by three gangsters until her first husband's bodyguard Office Boy (played by Chester Morris) sets her straight. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Lombard and Morris were not MGM's first choice. Jean Harlow was considered for Lombard's role and Clark Gable in Morris'. Lyle Talbot, Ricardo Cortez, Russell Hardie and Richard Arlen were all considered for Office Boy until it was finally given to Morris. Isabelle Jewell and Una Merkel were both mentioned for the role of Lombard's best friend, but it was ZaSu Pitts who appeared in the film.
Lombard had taken on The Gay Bride because of her trust in MGM's reputation for making top-notch pictures. As Larry Swindell wrote in his biography of Lombard, Screwball, "Being somewhat in awe of the studio's well-oiled production regimentation, she did not immediately sense [the film's] banality. But her costar Chester Morris did. He spoke grudgingly about going through the motions of another turkey and Carole said, "Well, you never can tell." [...] Morris said it was easy to tell how an MGM picture was doing while it was being shot. The telltale indication was if the primary concern was getting the work started on time each day and staying on schedule all week. Otherwise no attention was being paid. The executive producer wasn't a [Irving] Thalberg or a David Selznick but was Harry Rapf, an affable fellow but not a spectacularly discerning one. Jack Conway's proficiency lay in his attentions to paraphernalia not actors; and the awfulness of the script seemed only to bother Chester Morris until Carole also realized his assessment was correct."
Unhappy with The Gay Bride, Lombard finished principal shooting in only seven weeks. She was looking forward to a return to her home studio, Paramount, and had taken a short trip with her mother to Lake Arrowhead over the Labor Day weekend when she received word that her boyfriend Russ Columbo had been accidentally shot in the face while examining a pistol. By the time Lombard could drive back down to Los Angeles, Columbo was dead. Devastated but always a trouper, Lombard managed to return to MGM to complete retakes of The Gay Bride, a film she was already considering her worst.
The critics didn't argue with her; the film was universally panned, with Variety noting "Gangster pictures are gone, and this one won't do anything to bring them back. It'll do more to consign them permanently to Davey Jones' locker down where [box office] grosses don't count. It deals with hoodlums in a post-prohibition era, but fails to freshen up the story and the conventional means taken to carry it out." Blame was not placed upon the actors but on the script, as Photoplay pointed out "A good story loaded with plot complications and blurry character drawings. Even ZaSu Pitts seems more bewildered than usual."
Producer: John W. Considine, Jr.
Director: Jack Conway
Screenplay: Bella Spewack, Samuel Spewack; Charles Francis Coe (story "Repeal")
Cinematography: Ray June
Art Direction: Cedric Gibbons
Music: Jack Virgil; R.H. Bassett (uncredited)
Film Editing: Frank Sullivan
Cast: Carole Lombard (Mary Magiz), Chester Morris (Jimmie 'Office boy' Burnham), Zasu Pitts (Mirabelle), Leo Carrillo (Mickey 'The Greek' Mikapopoulis), Nat Pendleton (William T. 'Shoots' Magiz), Sam Hardy (Daniel J. Dingle), Walter Walker (MacPherson, the Lawyer).
BW-80m.
by Lorraine LoBianco
SOURCES:
Variety December 18, 1934
Photoplay Magazine January 1935
Screwball: The Life of Carole Lombard by Larry Swindell
