Lloyd Bacon | Office Wife / 1930

women in charge

by Douglas Messerli

 

Charles Kenyon (screenplay, based on a novel by Faith Baldwin), Lloyd Bacon (director) Office Wife / 1930

 

One might have chosen to simply include this among the numerous films made from 1930-1933 that featured stereotyped gay figures such as those I include in the long series of films featuring male sisses and female toughs which follows this essay; but Lloyd Bacon’s The Office Wife, begins with an event that might have been a remarkable alternative to what has been described as the “Panze Craze” of the early years of the 1930s.

      In general, the film is interesting only because it takes as its central theme the rise of female work force in the industrial age—mostly women working as office secretaries—analyzes the situation, and felicitously resolves in a manner which not all other movies with this theme have been able to. Moreover, along with The Clinging Vine of 1926, it might be seen as representing one of the earliest of the genre of “The Office Romance,” which quickly became one of the most popular heterosexual film genres throughout the 1930s to the present day including notable movies such as Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday (1940), Jean Negulesco Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960), Richard Donner’s Superman (1978), Colin Higgins 9 to 5 (1980), and Cameron Crowe’s Jerry Maguire (1996), to name somewhat curious examples from the following six decades of the 20th century.

       In his daily work, Publisher Larry Fellowes (Lewis Stone) is more than ably supported in his daily routine by his rather elderly secretary Andrews (Dale Fuller), a woman who having devoted her life to her boss has fallen in love with him, and faints away and quits her job when she discovers Fellowes is about to marry.

       Fellowes, now realizing Andrews’ situation, promotes a secretary respected for her intelligence more than her body, Anne Murdock (Dorothy Mackaill), to replace her as he proceeds on his honeymoon abroad. He returns to find an equally capable woman, but also a beautiful younger woman who, as she makes clear to her sister Katherine (Joan Blondell) with whom she boards, is not about to turn away a figure like Andrews. She will use her intelligence not simply to help her boss but steal the boss away from his marriage, a goal shared by many such secretaries throughout cinema history.

       Working long days and sometimes even weekends with her handsome but reserved employer, Anne becomes such a capable helpmate—a woman who tells him what to eat, when to take vacation, and keeps him on his daily schedule—with whom no wife could possibly compete. And predictably, he falls in love with her, particularly when he perceives that his wife Linda is having an affair with a mutual friend Jameson (Brooks Benedict).

      After a particularly exhausting night, working late with Anne, Fellowes finally kisses her, but at that very moment his wife appears and he is forced to return to his life behind the closed doors of his home which Anne is only temporarily inhabiting.

      Anne, having fallen completely love with Fellowes, realizes the danger of what she has been doing, and suddenly is ready to abandon her former goal, and with great pain and suffering, tenders of resignation informing her boss that she is now marrying Ted O’Hara (Walter Merrill) a boring small-town editor who has been courting her all along without success.

      Now spending time with Ted, she realizes even more clearly that he is not man for her, an intelligent woman who basically manages a company. Fellowes, meanwhile, has tried to mend his relationship with his wife, but too late, for she now wants a divorce.

      The two unhappy lovers are finally nudged toward one another through the machinations of Anne’s sister Katherine, who has discovered through Ted that Fellowes and his wife are getting a divorce.

      Working late for the last night of her employment, Anne finally reveals her love for her boss, and he his love for her, ending the movie on the predictable note, since the entire film was predicated upon the notion that employers spend more time with their capable secretaries than they ultimately do with their less than doting wives.

    Indeed, that very notion begins the film, with Fellowes perceiving the reality which he ends up proving. He has invited one of his most able writers to his office to discuss the idea of her writing a book on the subject. This figure, a successful author Kate Halsey (Blanche Friderici) is presented clearly as a lesbian. Film commentator Richard Barrios describes her as “a tweed-wearing, monocle-wielding Butchwoman, here sporting a man’s fedora.” She banters easily and forcibly with Fellowes while smoking a stogie that evidently is too strong for Fellowes’ taste, since he turns down her offer of a cigar with a comment, “Not one of yours, thanks.”

        But she is not presented as a comic figure at all. As Barrios continues, she is “strong, authoritative, talented, and good humored”; “A woman in charge, in short, a paragon of the independent New Women of the twenties” that was mocked in The Clinging Vine. “….She is portrayed as mildly eccentric, perhaps, certainly not heterosexual, and meriting her associates’ affection and respect.”

       How amazingly different is this film of 1930 from the equally capable but titteringly laughed at and openly mocked manservants, interior decorators, clothes designers, dance directors, and other homosexual figures of the 35 movies I write about below. Without any reason that this figure should necessarily be lesbian, Bacon and his writer Charles Kenyon simply represented her as different the rest of the heterosexual characters of the drama, and enriching the movie in the process.

       Office Wife, accordingly, much like Upstream, The Matinee Idol, Just Imagine, Myrt and Marge, and few others treat their obviously queer figures with a respect that few other Hollywood films could imagine, and employ them in a manner that reveals their capabilities rather than the simple silliness for even having existed. If only Hollywood filmmakers could have taken their cue from these few films, and realized how truly simple it was to present significant queer characters even within the confines of films that had no intentions of being profound, perhaps Breen and his ilk might have been silenced—although given their raging homophobia I sincerely doubt it.

       Kate Halsey does not again appear in the movie except for a couple of type-written paragraphs in which she has summarized some of the lessons Fellowes later learns (“Give her six months at side of any absorbed businessman and the office wife’s sufficient sympathy has reduced the influence of the wife at home to a mere maker of beds and pancakes”; “The fact that the businessman is unaware of his bondage, is the final proof of the office wife’s iron hold upon him”) But her brief appearance has been a significant one in that demonstrates the humanity and sophistication of the film’s central character and his world as opposed to most of the other “pansy” films that followed, in which homosexuals are tossed into the fray for a quick laugh like so many freaks despite the fact that they capably watch over their employer’s lives, design their furniture and clothing, furnish their houses, and help them to accomplish their business successes—while in real life they were sometimes even the actors, directors, and producers of the pictures in which their diminished brethren appeared.

 

Los Angeles, June 6, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).