The Cowboy and the Lady

Another movie I recorded some time back because it sounded interesting is The Cowboy and the Lady. I recently got around to watching it so that I could do a review on it here.

Merle Oberon appears first as the lady, because you don't expect her co-star Gary Cooper to be playing the lady. The lady in question, Mary Smith, is the daughter of Horace Smith (Henry Kolker), a wealthy man who's hoping to get nominated for president but needs the endorsement of some big power broker, this being the days before widespread presidential primaries. To that end, Dad doesn't want any scandal, which means that Mary hasn't gotten to do much with her life. At least her uncle Hannibal (Harry Davenport) has some sympathy for her plight.

Unfortunately, Mary has done something which might well bring scandal into her father's attempt to get that nomination. She went to a club one night, only for it to be one of those places that has illegal gambling. So of course the club was raided, and she wound up on the list of people caught up in the raid. Annoying for a run of the mill rich person, but possibly fatal to your father's hopes of securing the nomination. So Dad gets the brilliant idea of keeping his daughter out of the spotlight by sending her down to Palm Beach together with two maids, Katie (Patsy Kelly) and Elly (Mabel Todd).

The thing is, this isn't the Palm Beach of The Palm Beach Story or Some Like It Hot, but the Palm Beach of the off-season, when the other rich people don't go south for their health. Mary is there mostly alone, or at least only with the locals. (Looking it up, apparently Palm Beach swells by a factor of four during the snowbird season, and the Palm Beach County of 1940 had about 5% the population that it does doday.) Poor Mary,and she didn't do that much wrong.

For the locals, the rodeo is in town, and Katie and Elly decide they're going to go see the rodeo and then try to get dates with a couple of cowboys in the rodeo, which is how we get the title of the movie. Mary goes along, and is eventually paired with Stretch (Gary Cooper), who doesn't seem too interested in her. That leads Mary to tell a tall story about her family. Instead of being the well-to-do daughter of a possible presidential candidate, she's a made for a rich family looking after the Palm Beach home for the off-season and being the breadwinner for a drunken widowed father and four younger siblings. That gets Stretch's interest.

But of course you knew they were going to fall in love, or else we wouldn't have much of a movie. Stretch immediately wants Mary to marry him, something she doesn't think she can do because that would really cause a scandal. But she does love Stretch, so she follows him onto the steamer sailing back for Stretch's home, or at least to the port of Galveston from where he'll go overland to his ranch. But Mary falls in love with Stretch enough that she actually marries him on the boat!

How's she going to get out of this? Or how is she going to get out of causing her father a scandal. There are some twists and turns, but this is the sort of story where you know how it's going to end, mostly, with the titular cowboy and lady winding up together in the final reel.

There's not really anything wrong with The Cowboy and the Lady so much as it is a movie where you feel like everything's been done a bunch of times already, and done better. It's material that would have been perfect for Olivia de Havilland and somebody at Warner Bros., or Joan Fontaine at RKO, or perhaps for some people one of the studios was trying to groom for stardom. Gary Cooper had already shown his adeptness at a certain form of comedy, and what he's asked to do here comes extremely easy to him. Oberon is adequate, too.

If you're looking for a 1930s romantic comedy, you could do far worse than The Cowboy and the Lady. But you could also do far better.