THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L Jr.
THE SCREEN When Sidney Furie's Gable and Lombard begins with a match dissolve from the real Gable and Lombard to James Brolin and Jill Clayburgh, the actors who play the title roles, the film is...
...From her high forehead and arching eyebrows to her suggestively meaty hips and legs, Lombard gave the impression of being a match for any situation she got into, or any man...
...Where Lombard was wacky, Clayburgh is just wacked out...
...The imposing, padded clothes of the thirties that Gable filled out so handsomely look somewhat baggy and excessive on Brolin...
...Gone are the bitter jealousies and suspicions of infidelity that sometimes flared up between them...
...Authentic little details like this are, along with Lombard's foul-mouthing, very much the point of Gable and Lombard...
...As Gable and Lombard, Brolin and Clayburgh miss in much the same way...
...Where Lombard was sensuous, Clayburgh is merely slinky...
...In physical terms alone, neither Brolin nor Clayburgh is equal to the role...
...The film was originally to be entitled Lombard and Gable, and she deserved that top billing too, for it is her personality, not Gable's, that still has currency enough to be worth making a movie about...
...On the other hand, this film does detail at some length, and for every laugh that can be wrung out of it, the time Lombard had a mitten knitted for Gable's "best part...
...It hardly seems worth the effort to have done a big, expensive and only mildly entertaining film like this today...
...This fact only makes it all the more ironical that it is Lombard that Gable and Lombard is really about...
...Besides being one of the most popular stars in Hollywood's heyday, Lombard was one of the shrewdest businesswomen, negotiating for herself more lucrative, flexible contracts than anyone else, including Gable...
...A good deal of this film is shot in sunlit interiors which are lavish, thirty-ish, beautiful and, somehow, all wrong...
...Gone are all but one of both Gable's and Lombard's previous marriages...
...The reason no doubt is Gone with the Wind, whose enormous popularity and frequent revivals have fixed Gable's face in our consciousness like no others except, maybe, those of the presidents on small-denomination bills...
...Still, that issue is of interest because only one of the two, Brolin, seems to have been cast for his close resemblance to the person he portrays...
...The specific ways that Clayburgh or Brolin resemble the people they are playing are not die crucial issue...
...The motive for avoiding such sullied realities is that Furie has wanted to make of Gable and Lombard's life together pretty much the same sort of film they themselves were often in: a screwball comedy...
...But she was also known to insiders as one of the most extroverted and brassy females in tinsel town...
...Likewise, Clayburgh simply hasn't the presence to be Lombard...
...For all her energy, Clayburgh looks slightly crumpled much of the time...
...In the thirties the paints were shinier and thinner, but the walls were more solid...
...But back in the thirties, Gable's own really great comedies-It Happened One Night or Wife vs...
...Secretary-and Lombard's-Twentieth Century, Nothing Sacred or My Man Godfrey-were made with so much less strain, hoopla and money...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR.BECK, JR...
...Where Gable was broad-faced and thick-chested-a "he-man," as the phrase that seems invented for him has it-Brolin is narrower and slighter...
...Not until the seventies has moviemaking caught up with the "real" Carole Lombard-now it can be told!- whose personality this film portrays in a hundred un-censored but trivial ways...
...Gable and Lombard is a passable one, too, a picture that probably would have paid its way on some double bill back in the thirties...
...The paint on the walls is always the flat, latex-base variety that we use today to give the three-eighths inch wallboard from which houses are now made a little texture...
...The very look of Brolin and Clayburgh is wrong...
...What makes the real Carole Lombard as marketable a figure today as her screen image was in the thirties is the way her private life splatters a bit of raunchiness on her public glamour...
...The effect of this emphasis, curiously, is to clean up the Gable-Lombard story, to remove any unseemliness from it...
...Gone are Gable's stinginess and Lombard's extravagance, her promiscuity and his exploitation of women, her blind jingoism and his unmanly reluctance to join the armed services...
...It's as if, once the real Gable and Lombard have faded out, no new image fades in...
...She was what every woman in this liberated era would like to be, and what every man would like to have: a woman who is, beneath a beautiful, composed and successful exterior, a real brawler-a woman whose charm, elegance and ambition when she's on the town are exceeded only by her ability to enjoy herself when she's in bed...
...THE SCREEN When Sidney Furie's Gable and Lombard begins with a match dissolve from the real Gable and Lombard to James Brolin and Jill Clayburgh, the actors who play the title roles, the film is almost all over right then and there...
...Gable and Lombard doesn't go so far as to show us how she seduced Frederic March while wearing a huge rubber dildo which, she guessed rightly, would send him fleeing in panic when he discovered it under her dress...
...Their inappropriateness lies in the general ways that the physical types of the seventies differ from those of the thirties...
...While striving for absolute verisimilitude in some things, the filmmakers freely omit or fictionalize others...
...Whoever played Gable and Lombard are bound to suffer by comparison, of course, but this ill-advised optical effect makes them do so before they have even had a fighting chance to act in the roles...
...This is interesting because it suggests the filmmakers assume that Lombard is less memorable than Gable-that we don't have her face in mind any more firmly enough to need a lookalike as we do for Gable...
Vol. 103 • March 1976 • No. 6
