Mimi Swift (Myrna Loy) is obsessed with her penniless playboy boyfriend, Alan Wythe (Walter Pidgeon). When he throws her over to marry the rich heiress, Elizabeth Kent (Rosalind Russell), Mimi is devastated, but plots to win Alan back. She is counseled against this by her ever-wise novelist mother, Meg Swift (Nana Bryant) and her mother’s friend, newspaper artist Jimmy Kilmartin (Franchot Tone).
After Alan returns from his honeymoon, he and Mimi agree to continue on as the best of friends, with no hindrance of romantic love between them. However, both of them, and the viewer, know better. When Mimi finally believes that she has finally won Alan, his wife, Elizabeth, is forced to confront Alan’s true nature. That realization, in a well-crafted and well-delivered speech, ends up leaving each of them in out in the cold. No one wins.
Spinning out of control, Mimi decides to take Jimmy’s advice and reject the whole concept of love. When the two of them decide to embark on their own non-romantic friendship, of course the inevitable happens. As the movie ends on a happy note (at least for them), Mimi’s mother laughs and proclaims, “The end of a beautiful friendship!”
Sound familiar? Bogey said a much more famous variation on this line to Claude Rains as two of them walked off into the rain in at the end of Casablanca (1943).
Directed by Richard Thorpe, Man-Proof is based on a Ladies Home Journal weeper by Fannie Heaslip Lea, but the stars inject it with more humor than I’m sure the original script had. Despite a big scene at Alan and Elizabeth’s wedding, and a later scene at a boxing match, most of the story takes place in smaller rooms in combinations of just two or three actors. In this way, the film has the feel of a stage play, but without its sometimes claustrophobic nature. Each actor gets to chew a good bit of well-written dialogue that manages to avoid falling over into excessive melodrama.
In a rarity for Loy, she gets a couple of extended drunk scenes. Even in her heavy drinking days with William Powell in the first few Thin Man movies, we never saw her drunk and only once ever feeling the effects of a hangover (The Thin Man, 1934). In an early gripping scene as a drunken bridesmaid at the wedding of her ex-lover, Pidgeon, Loy suddenly sobers up to offer him a chilling piece of advice:
“Oh, I’m not a nice girl, Alan. I tried every trick in the bag to be the bride. But I’m this nice. I’m perfectly willing to warn you; when you come back, I wouldn’t have anything to do with a girl like me, if I were you. I’d keep the seven seas between us – and wish they were eight.”
This scene gives us a hint of what Loy could have done as a 1940’s-style film noir femme fatale if Man-Proof had been one, as its title strongly evokes. Loy broke into films in 1925 and quickly became type-cast playing the vamp or a villainous ‘exotic’; roles that anticipated the classic femme fatale to come later. These roles persisted up through 1932 in which year Loy played the villainous (and sadistic) daughter of the title character in The Mask of Fu Manchu and the revenge-driven ‘half-caste’ in Thirteen Woman – both well worth watching!. Her role as Nora Charles in The Thin Man series finally revealed her flair for comedy and established her as a star, allowing Loy to leave the ‘bad girl’ roles she disliked so much far behind.
Is Man-Proof worth my time? Definitely. The stars are all in top form, and despite a few creaks in the script, it is very well written and directed. The movie also benefits from a score by Franz Waxman and cinematography by Karl Freund who stages some stylish shots that help elevate the movie.
Availability: Man-Proof was released as a Warner Archive POD, but I don't see it listed there now. Fortunately, other on-line sellers carry it.
