Archie Mayo | It’s Love I’m After / 1937

standing by his man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Casey Robinson (screenplay, based on Gentlemen After Midnight by Maurice Hanline), Archie Mayo (director) It’s Love I’m After / 1937

In the tradition of Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby, Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey, Preston Sturges’ The Palm Beach Story, and William A. Wellman’s Nothing Sacred, the 1937 film It’s Love I’m After is a splendid example of the US screwball comedy. The reason you may not have heard of the last one is that its director, Archie Mayo, directed dozens of interesting films but seldom managed a truly significant work, unless you want to include his somewhat stultified version of the stage play The Petrified Forest (1936) or the soap-operaish Four Sons (1940). Despite often wonderful casts—in this instance Leslie Howard, Bette Davis, and Olivia de Havilland—Mayo simply didn’t have the golden touch, relying more on stock situations and involuted plots than focusing on the talents at hand.

       In It’s Love he’s forced to rely mainly on dialogue from old melodramas and melodramatic renditions of Shakespeare’s plays, which actually works well for Howard playing a comic ham actor and veteran womanizer Basil Underwood in a deeply committed love/hate relationship with fellow thespian Joyce Arden (Davis) who is given the opportunity to let loose with every angry invective she might ever have wanted to as Margo Channing in her later film All About Eve. A young, 21-year-old de Havilland, in only her third year of making movies, gets to play the impetuous lover that Carole Lombard perfected (Lombard was in two of the films I name above), and, working quite against character, does a credible job when the mad duet of Howard and Davis aren’t tossing barbs at one another. But more than the splendid acting of these three professionals, Mayo this around had a special treat for his audiences: Eric Blore playing the role he plays best, the intimate and impertinent gentlemen’s dresser and personal confident, in this case named Digges.

        In fact, nearly all the real humor of this work derives from his dialogue with his employer Howard. So I’ll quickly kill off the rest of the plot to get to the heart of his LGBTQ gem by summarizing. Basil loves Joyce, but they are actors who spend their entire time together battling out their love through the melodramatic gestures and sentiments of the dramas in which they perform, allowing little time in between to kiss, make up, and promise to get married, the latter of which they nonetheless have, as Digges puts it, come to the “precipice” of twelve times. Presumably they’ll never actually marry, nor really make up, but will wake up one day realizing that they have all along been a couple truly in love, despite Basil’s dozens of tawdry affairs, of which he forces Digges to keep count, weighing them against any good deeds he accidently accomplishes; he remains always in the negative according to Digges faithful tallying up of the scores.

        Yet this quarreling couple, a cleverer Punch and Judy might have lived on in perfect stasis had not the young romantic dreamer Marcia West (de Havilland) happened to see Basil in his tights playing Hamlet. Although she’s engaged to be married to a perfectly nice young man, Henry Grant, Jr. (Patric Knowles), the problem, as her aunt Ella Paisley (Spring Byington) puts it, is that there is no problem with Henry who is, after all, perfectly nice; and the perfectly nice girl suddenly wants a little nastiness in her life.

        A quick visit by Marcia to Basil’s after-show dressing room does nothing but rouse her girlish instability, forcing the foolhardy Henry to seek a solution to a problem that might have resolved in a few days—after all, as Marcia later puts it to Basil, “I was in love with Clark Gable last year, and if I could get over him, it's a cinch I could get over you.”—if he’d not insisted that Basil visit Marcia and her family, playing such a cad that she will be cured of her romance, the plot of one of his most successful plays.

        Inevitably, just the opposite occurs: the more he demeans her, the more she adjusts to the situation and falls even more fervently in love, until Basil ponders:  “I say, Digges, you don't suppose I've aroused her slap-me-again-I-love-it complex?”—something like the behavior I bemoaned recently in my discussion of the 1925 film My Lady of Whims. Whatever her condition, she so insistently maintains her innocent adulation of the actor that even he becomes confused, wondering, when looking into the dreamy eyes of this fresh young person, if he might shift his role to that of ardent lover instead of the blaggard, at which point Digges has no choice but to call his regular savior, Joyce Arden herself. Yet this time out of anger she only further confuses the mess into which her lover’s got by pretending to Marcia to be his wife realizing that she must give him up to his greater happiness. Meanwhile, reminding Basil that with Marcia he will have “love in morning, love for lunch, and love for dinner,” she awakens him to a terrifying fate of freedom from Joyce’s venomous bites.

       But, of course, everything eventually works out, with the very nice girl going off her very nice beau, and the loving couple spitting out the hate for one another happily ever after.

       In between and before, and surely later, we have the real heart of the story, the love—with either the audience or the character actually realizing it—Basil is truly “always after”: that of his constant companion Digges. Even if by this time Joseph Breen and the Hays Code had blackballed pansies, they somehow left Eric Blore behind to look after men like Howard’s Basil Underwood and Edward Everett Horton’s Horace Hardwick. who always seem to prefer his company to the women they are supposedly busy chasing. Whether he be named Digges, Bates, or Cecil he whistles out his sibilants to include the nominative of the possessive pronoun “we,” a communal utterance which marries the men he dresses to himself more thoroughly than any marriage vow might. 

        Mayo visually established the hierarchy of Basil’s relationships with Digges and Joyce quite early in the film, with both simultaneously observing Marcia leaving Basil’s dressing room. Bigges stands next to Basil in the foreground, while his fellow actress and lover Joyce stands behind, having just left her own dressing room on the way to visit Basil.

        Throughout this film and so many others, Blore as Digges, in this case, reassures his permanent companion time again not only that he stands by him—

 

Basil Underwood: Down in the street below, a great carnival of people... happy together. And up here, one man, miserably alone.

Digges: I'm here, sir.

Basil Underwood: Oh, you're always here, Digges.

Digges: Yes, I thank you, sir.

 

—and that he truly loves him.

 

Basil Underwood: Digges, why is it no one loves me?

Digges: But I love you, sir.

Basil Underwood: Don't confuse the issue. Am I really such a bad fellow as she thinks?

Digges: Oh, please, sir. Don't let's go into that now.

Basil Underwood: There's loyalty for you. Alone in the city.

 

    At another point when Basil questions his loyalty to Joyce, wondering aloud if he hasn’t made his love clear, Digges interceding with the phrase: “Not unless you’ve been cheating on me sir,” the me being the indeterminate pronoun whose identity the dresser always assumes.

    In their constant acting out of scenes, Digges time and again plays the female to Basil’s male leads, “The girl from Venice enters. “Kiss me!”

    Once ensconced in the West estate, Digges reads Basil his daily letters from his female fans, which when Marcia’s naughty little sister Gracie (Bonita Granville)—clearly a cousin to Tracy’s Lord’s sister Dinah in The Philadelphia Story—overhears by listening through the keyhole, she naturally assumes they are speaking of their love for one another, describing them very much as they truly are to her pedestrian family members:

 

Gracie Kane: ...there's a couple of crazy men in the room next to me.

Mrs. Kane: How do you know?

Gracie Kane: Oh, I peeked through the keyhole. I always do. It's very educational.

 

     I’m sure it is. If nothing else, it’s significant that such men also always share their rooms with their dresser, sometimes even living in different suites apart from the women to whom they are supposed to be in love or to whom they are married. Even on the precipice of heterosexual marriage, Digges toasts “Well here’s to our wedding!” And the puns of their conjugal relationship go rolling through the films with no one to deny or dispel their suggested meanings. Even when the story gets a bit repetitive or boring, we will always have Blore to straighten our ties, pack our suitcases, and take care that we behave as such gentlemen are wont to behave.

 

Los Angeles, February 18, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2022).