Crossed Stars

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

GABLE AND LOMBARD

Directed by SIDNEY J. FURIE Screenplay by BARRY SANDIER

"They had more than love--they had fun." So say the ads for Gable and Lombard. Unbelievably, there is more historical truth--which is to say, the barest acceptable minimum--in that simple adman's conceit than there is in the entire length of the vulgar, banal and finally repulsive movie it is designed to promote.

Antique gossip indicates that this crossed-star romance was an easy, affectionate sort of thing, enlivened by the lady's raucous sense of humor and stabilized by Gable's patient amusement with her flights. Both appear to have been unpretentious people, genuinely surprised--and moved--by their luck at finding one another in the marital climate of haute Hollywood in the late '30s. Others, alternately freezing and frying in that weird weather, were apparently much comforted by the example Gable and Lombard set.

It would have been both pleasant and salutary to see a film about a good match prevailing against the odds--sort of like seeing a re-release of a Nick and Nora Charles picture. But it would have required the wit and style that informed the inexpensively made Thin Man films and other light, sophisticated romances, some of which starred Lombard herself. These qualities, once so readily found in American movies, have now vanished. A cloddish script slams at us single-entendre jokes about sex. Doltish direction hammers them home with the sweaty desperation of a bad nightclub comic whose act is dying. The stars were discovered on television. James Brolin, who plays the young doctor on Marcus Welby, gives a congealed imitation of Gable, not an interpretation. Jill Clayburgh, who was spotted on Hustling, a made-for-television movie, is driven into a frenzied impersonation not of Lom bard but of at least six actresses in search of an author.

Gross Cartoon. In short, the movie is bad in all the conventional ways.

There are minor historical howlers, and the lighting is so inept that in one key scene Lombard's shadow falls on Gable's face, blocking out his reactions.

What makes the film perversely interesting is the one quite novel way it has found to be bad. Gable was married when he met Lombard and apparently suffered the usual expensive difficulties that the newly rich have in shedding the mate who shared all the early struggles. Meantime, he and Lombard discreetly lived together until the lawyers could do their work.

The script converts this inconvenience into a spurious moral crisis. It borrows Charles Chaplin's famous paternity suit and gives it to Gable so that Lombard can risk her career by testifying in open court that Gable could not have fathered another woman's child because he had been in bed with her every night for months. In order to make this fiction plausible, huge amounts of screen time are devoted to setting up an us-against-them situation. It presents morally realistic (that is, morally relative) Hollywood fighting off armies of blue-haired ladies who want to impose their outmoded behavioral codes. This is an example of Hollywood paranoia at its most ludicrous, a fundamental mis reading of both its former audience and the gullibility of its present one. It renders absurd a conclusion in which the public rallies to the lovers' forthrightness that converts them into heroic pioneers of the new morality. The social history of moviemaking is one of the most interesting histories available to us, and it is infuriating to see it presented as a gross cartoon by people in a position to know better.

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