Rebound, based on a hit play by Donald Ogden Stewart, is a multi-sided romantic roundelay. Loy plays Evie, one of a group of young moderns who jilts her boyfriend Bill (Robert Ames) to marry a millionaire. On the rebound, Bill marries his former girlfriend Sara, played by stage star Ina Claire, who had originated the part on Broadway. Claire was pushing 40 and Loy was a radiant 26, but according to Loy, the star told director Edward H. Griffith, "You don't think 'Sunbonnet Sue' there could take a man away from me, do you?" As Lawrence J. Quirk writes in The Films of Myrna Loy, Bill eventually realizes that "his inamorata with the face of a sloe-eyed angel actually has the soul of a devil." This was one of many polished and selfish other women that Loy played early in her career, on her way to becoming the movies' perfect wife.
By the 1920s, Ina Claire was one of the theater's most renowned stars, specializing in sophisticated comedies. She appeared in less than a dozen films, preferring to work on the stage. In her autobiography, Loy recalled being in awe of Claire and sneaking onto a closed set to watch Claire work. "It was a lovers' scene, a high point in the story, where she had to do a lot of tricks. She did them brilliantly." Loy complimented her and Claire shrugged it off, attributing it to the Delsarte acting method that relies on specific gestures and movement to indicate character and emotion. "I waited for that scene at the screening and, curiously, it never happened," Loy wrote. "It would have been an effective thing onstage, but there is something mysterious about film--it's got to come from inside, it can't be technical." Perhaps that's one reason why Claire's film career never caught fire. On film, she seems artificial, in contrast to Loy, whose ease and naturalism was made for film.
However, Claire was not above using her theatrical tricks to overwhelm her younger, fresher competition. According to a friend of Loy's quoted in her autobiography, in one scene Claire "started out in a staccato voice and Myrna couldn't even interrupt. Myrna, just a novice, simply couldn't beat down this old actress who really knew how to cut everybody. She really ruined the scene for Myrna." Director Edward H. Griffith, however, was impressed with Loy, and the following year he cast her as the conventional wife of free-spirited Leslie Howard in the prestigious The Animal Kingdom, which earned her critical acclaim and became an important stepping stone in her career.
The two male costars of Rebound, Robert Williams and Robert Ames, both died young, and within a few weeks of each other. Theater actor Robert Williams reprised the role of Johnnie that he'd played onstage in Rebound. He died of peritonitis following surgery on November 3, 1931, three days after the premiere of his film Platinum Blonde. Robert Ames died three weeks later, apparently from delirium tremens caused by an abrupt withdrawal from alcohol. As for Loy, after supporting roles in another eight mostly undistinguished films, she finally scored a role worthy of her comic gifts in Rouben Mamoulian's delicious 1932 musical, Love Me Tonight. But it was hit or miss after that until she finally struck comic gold and well-earned stardom with The Thin Man, finally ending the apprenticeship that lasted far longer than her talent deserved.
Director: Edward H. Griffith
Producer: Charles Rogers
Screenplay: Horace Jackson, from the play by Donald Ogden Stewart
Cinematography: Norbert Brodine
Principal Cast: Ina Claire (Sara Jaffrey), Robert Ames (Bill Truesdale), Myrna Loy (Evie Lawrence), Robert Williams (Johnnie Coles), Hedda Hopper (Liz Crawford), Hale Hamilton (Lyman Patterson)
88 minutes
by Margarita Landazuri
