Biogaphry of a Bachelor Girl

TCM ran the movie Biography of a Bachleor Girl not too long ago. It's going to be on again tomorrow morning at 6:00 AM if you want to watch it for yourself.

Ann Harding plays the titular unmarried woman, an artist named Marion Forsythe. She apparently gained some fame while she was over in Europe, and is now returning to her native America. Richard "Dickie" Kurt (Robert Montgomery in an odd pair of spectacles for him) is a magazine editor who has come up with a great idea to pitch to his publisher to help shore up the magazine's flagging fortunes. He'll get Marion to write her autobiography, which will be serialized in their magazine, and that will boost circulation.

Kurt goes to the boat Marion is sailing in on and finds that he's not the only one who wants her attention. There's also Feydak (Edward Arnold), brother of an artist Marion knew, but for whatever reason Feydak seems to drop out of the movie fairly early on. Eventually Kurt is able to talk to Marion about the biography, and since she's in need of money, she reluctantly accepts.

But this is going to cause other problems. Earlier in life, she met lawyer Leander "Bunny" Nelson (Edward Everett Horton) and apparently had a torrid affair with him. This shouldn't be a big deal nowadays, but for the mid-1930s such affairs probably were more scandalous. Bunny wasn't married at the time, but now he's engaged to Slade Kinnicott (Una Merkel), daughter of a newspaper publisher back in her and Bunny's home state. And Bunny is now running for the US Senate, so if news of that affair were to come out, he fears it would sink his candidacy.

So Bunny has what he feels is a perfectly good reason for trying to convince Marion not to write that memoir, while Kurt has own job to think of in trying to get Marion to fulfill their agreement. Eventually Marion goes back to a small town to consider her prospects, with everybody following her.

Biography of a Bachelor Girl came out in the beginning of 1935, and it really feels like the sort of movie that was badly neutered by the enforcement of the Production Code, which began in July 1934. There's a fair amount of potential in the material, but none of it was realized as the movie can't seem decide whether it wants to be a comedy or a drama. There's also the disappearance of Feydak, and the whole small-town thing not working here the way it did in many other movies.

Biography of a Bachelor Girl does not seem to be on DVD as far as I can tell, so you're going to have to watch the TCM showing.