A William Powell Quadruple Feature

The plot of the "The Emperor's Candlesticks" (1937) is total nonsense: a 1930s' MGM's fantasies about benevolent despots, courteous kidnappers, and gallant spies. The story is only an excuse for a masquerade ball and a dash across Europe in pursuit of two candelabras that do not belong to the Russian czar or the Austro-Hungarian emperor, but are a gift from an Austrian nobleman to a Russian noblewomen. The carriers (the Polish Baron Wolensky and the Russian Countess Mironova, played by the stars of the movie, William Powell and Luise Rainer) lose and find and mistakenly switch the pair of candelabras.

Powell was unflappable in the midst of many ludicrous plots during the 1930s, often with Myrna Loy as a co-conspirator. Here, he is pitted against a lovely czarist secret agent, played, in a large wardrobe, by the great Luise Rainer. In the two immediately preceding films for which she won back-to-back Oscars ("The Great Ziegfeld" with Powell and "The Good Earth" with Paul Muni) and in her only other readily available film, "The Great Waltz," she suffered mightily. In "Candlesticks" she got a chance to play the kind of glamorous clotheshorse role in which Marlene Dietrich specialized, with no occasion for jealousy at all. Dietrich and Greta Garbo both played spies in 1930s movies. Each appeared more sophisticated than Rainer's, but I find Rainer more credible as a spy with regrets about the consequences of her occupation than either Dietrich or Garbo. Rainer was also quite beautiful with high cheekbones and eyebrows as plucked as Dietrich, and received star keylighting from MGM.

Back in a gilded cage, Robert Young got a chance to be charming and gallant, impeded by the humorous bumbling minder played by Frank Morgan (the veritable wizard of Oz, two years later).

___

I find the onscreen duo Myrna Loy and William Powell considerably more fun to watch than the Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy one the followed at MGM. Hepburn has an undeserved reputation for independence though on-screen and off she had a slavish relationship to Tracy. Loy did not spend her pictures with Powell looking at him with the devotion dogs show their masters. Powell did not set out to break Loy's spirit in any of their movies I can remember.

During the latter half of the 1930s, Powell and Loy repeatedly played a married couple (would it seem piling on to note that their teaming through off a lot more erotic sparks than the insecure Hepburn heroines' submission to the paternalistic Tracy leads?). Generally, Powell played straight man to Loy's quips and the two of them exchanged knowing looks in response to pompous or otherwise outrageous statements made by other characters. The "Thin Man" movies in which Loy and Powell played Nora and Nick Charles are somewhat suspect now in glamorizing alcoholism, but the Charleses also glamorized marriage. This was a couple who enjoyed each other's company and had a good time navigating through a world of complicated murders, suspicious but dumb cops, and lowlifes they were invariably able to charm.

In the 1941 "Love Crazy" there is something of a role reversal, with Powell acting out in various ways (I especially enjoyed his "liberating" the hats checked at a swank party) and Loy playing "straight (wo)man." There are plenty of quips in the script, and some very funny satire of smug psychiatrists, but also a lot of slapstick, including a throw rug that throws both its donor and its recipient, a cockatoo who lures Powell to disaster, a finicky elevator that sets up his head going up and down caught in a door, characters trapped hanging upside down from trees in an asylum, and a drag disguise literally unraveling.

Loy's Susan Ireland is not totally unfazed. Indeed, she takes off in a huff after some ill-advised attempts to make her husband Steve jealous with a buffoonish ace archer Ward Willoughby (Jack Carson). Mostly though, she looks unimpressed by Steve's frantic attempts to forestall a divorce. Pretty much everyone else in the movie loses their composure (even the usually unflappable Powell), but Loy cuts through the pretenses, while remaining sympathetic. She wants to divorce Powell for lying to her, but she does not want him hurt or to ruin his life. She sees through his plottings and calls every bluff. He gets deeper and deeper into trouble and her reactions are as entertaining as his desperate and humiliating antics.

I find it hard to believe that Susan could continue to keep company with Ward Willoughby, but the absurdity of that pairing convincingly exacerbates Steven's irritation. He does get to toy with his obnoxious, intrusive, and disapproving mother-in-law (Florence Bates) and has the last laugh on Ward Willoughby (the audience knows he will, so I don't think this counts as a plot spoiler: the interest is in how, not in whether).

Ray June's cinematography is fitting for the hijinks of the upper class. I don't have any particular sense of director Jack Conway, though during the last year I have seen a number of films he directed (Red-Headed Woman and Saratoga with Jean Harlow, Libeled Lady with Harlow, Powell, Loy, and Spencer Tracy; Too Hot to Handle with Loy and Clark Cable; The Hucksters, and finished Viva Villa), and know he directed "Tale of Two Cities").

I enjoyed the film. Powell could do silly as well as debonair, and Loy was a marvelously astute and glamorous sophisticate in their films together. Rather than being broken by Powell, she decides his fate. She has no wish to break him, either, though she demands honesty. And she has a rare ability not to be influenced by what others think

---

My William Powell quadruple feature also included the hackneyed gallantry of the 1934 "The Key" directed by Michael Curtiz. The hunting down of Donald Crisp (prefiguring "Odd Man Out") is well done and the giving up the true love looks forward to "Casablanca" (also directed by Curtiz).

More enjoyable was Powell's paring with an imperious Jean Arthur (A Foreign Affair), a mystery novelist he used to be married to in "The Ex-Mrs. Bradford" (1936). She moves into his apartment and entangles him in another murder investigation. The slapstick is limited and dreary (her knocking him out during fights with others) and there is not the level of rapport between Arthur and Powell that there was between Loy and Powell, but there are good lines... and a very complicated and unbelievable method of murder. It's hard to care whodunit or why, but Powell is a good straight man for the brash Arthur.