Nothing Sacred

William Wellman’s film starts well enough with writer Ben Hecht’s typically smart digs (particularly at the expense of the people of Vermont) and cynical dialogue providing considerable amusement.

Using the at-the-time very popular setting of the newspaper racket the story has reporter Wallace Cook (Frederic March), who is smarting after having been duped by a Negro bootblack into believing him to be an African potentate, proposing to his editor, Oliver Stone (Walter Connolly) a series of stories on country gal Hazel Flagg who is supposedly dying of radium poisoning. The twist is, she isn’t about to pas on but she wants to get to the Big Apple and so Cook is duped again. This is all good stuff but once the hoax is exposed (by Sig Ruman playing his stock character as Dr. Emil Eggelhoffer) the film runs out of puff leaving it with nothing to do but to pad out the time until the inevitable resolution.  

Hecht (with Charles Lederer) subsequently perfected the mad-cap comedy formula that this aspires to be in His Girl Friday (1940), with Howard Hawks at the helm and with Cary Grant instead of here the much-less-effective Frederic March (who had starred in Wellman's version of A Star Is Born, also released in 1937) and Rosalind Russell taking the place of Carole Lombard in another newspaper business yarn.

 

Want something different?