Jean Harlow stars in "Three Wise Girls," a 1932 precode with Mae Clarke, Marie Provost, and Walter Byron.
Harlow is a flashy, brassy-looking blond named Cassie making $15 a week in her home town and fighting off men. She's finally had it and moves to New York, where a friend helps her get a job as a model in a dress shop. There she meets a man, Jerry (Walter Byron), a man with money who takes her out and treats her well and respectfully. She falls for him. Then she finds out that he's married. Well, he is and he isn't. While her friend Gladys (Clarke) is in love with a married man and living off of him, Jerry and his wife aren't together. She's always telling him she has to approve of his new intended before she'll grant a divorce. So it's not quite the same thing.
Cassie, however, doesn't stick around long enough to hear what he has to say and no matter what, she's distrustful enough of men that she won't believe him. She decides that perhaps she had better go back home.
Good movie, but the other two girls take a back seat, and one, the Clarke character, isn't exactly wise. Marie Provost is the comic roommate who falls for Jerry's chauffeur (Andy Devine).
Jean Harlow is, as she always was, adorable -- vulnerable, warm, childlike, and she looks smashing in the gowns she models. She could look for all the world like a femme fatale, but there was always a sense of fun and something too sweet about her to be trashy or dangerous. A very special presence, and one lost to cinema way too early.
One of the problems is that the type of leading man in this particular movie -- older-seeming, mustached, and wooden -- considered so devastating by these characters, has gone way out of style today. So it's hard to look at one of them and see the appeal other than money.
Well worth seeing for the magical Harlow.
Harlow is a flashy, brassy-looking blond named Cassie making $15 a week in her home town and fighting off men. She's finally had it and moves to New York, where a friend helps her get a job as a model in a dress shop. There she meets a man, Jerry (Walter Byron), a man with money who takes her out and treats her well and respectfully. She falls for him. Then she finds out that he's married. Well, he is and he isn't. While her friend Gladys (Clarke) is in love with a married man and living off of him, Jerry and his wife aren't together. She's always telling him she has to approve of his new intended before she'll grant a divorce. So it's not quite the same thing.
Cassie, however, doesn't stick around long enough to hear what he has to say and no matter what, she's distrustful enough of men that she won't believe him. She decides that perhaps she had better go back home.
Good movie, but the other two girls take a back seat, and one, the Clarke character, isn't exactly wise. Marie Provost is the comic roommate who falls for Jerry's chauffeur (Andy Devine).
Jean Harlow is, as she always was, adorable -- vulnerable, warm, childlike, and she looks smashing in the gowns she models. She could look for all the world like a femme fatale, but there was always a sense of fun and something too sweet about her to be trashy or dangerous. A very special presence, and one lost to cinema way too early.
One of the problems is that the type of leading man in this particular movie -- older-seeming, mustached, and wooden -- considered so devastating by these characters, has gone way out of style today. So it's hard to look at one of them and see the appeal other than money.
Well worth seeing for the magical Harlow.