Nothing Sacred (1937)

Before His Girl Friday (1940) came this other screwball comedy about journalism, the perfect scoop and disception. After getting on the bad side of his boss, newsman Wally Cook (Frederic March) is demoted from the living and forced to write obituaries. It's quite the awful set up and Cook desperately looks for another story to get him in the good graces of the Morning Star's editor.

The perfect new flash has just come up in the form of a woman who is soon going to die of radium poisoning and so Wally Cook goes to meet her. Heading up from New York he ends in the one horse town in Vermont. He meets a lot of unoblidging people whose vocabulary is limited to Yup and Nope. He finally comes across the crying girl who has just left an appointment with a doctor. He comforts the girl cheering her up by promising a trip to the big city where she will be treated like royalty (And he'll get his story). So Hazel Flagg soon becomes the sweetheart of New York with public appearances at Madison Square Gurden, parades, poems, articles and special honors. It's all going according to Cook's plan, the only thing is that Hazel is not actually ill.

That's a wrench in the plan and soon it becomes evident that Cook will look like a cad. To make matters worse he's falling for her and his editor Oliver Stone is all over him. Now he must take part in Hazel's charade despite his annoyance. She too is annoyed and ends the game so the two lovebirds can elope. Still the story of Hazel is given a romanticized ending that the public deserves. Frederic March is decent as the desperate and long suffering journalist. Carole Lombard is her typical light headed, whimsy, high strung, scatterbrained, sniveling self. It proves to be a volatile combination partnered with Ben Hecht's script. The news industry loses a lot of its self-respect for the sake of laughs, because nothing's sacred. Some might be interested to know that it was shot in glorious technicolor and it was the only time Lombard would appear in a technicolor film. She would of course die in a tragic plane crash in 1942.

This film was quite short so the story moved quickly and there were definitely some screwy moments. I am however partial to His Girl Friday and some of the other more well known screwballs.

3.5/5 Stars