Cain and Mabel

Another of the movies that I recently watched was Cain and Mabel, which is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.

The first thing I noticed was that the opening credits only mentioned the two lead actors, Marion Davies and Clark Gable, and not any of the other actors, which made for a fun game trying to recognize the various cast members until their names are listed in the closing credits for anybody who didn't bother to look them up. Davies plays Mabel and shows up first.

Mabel O'Dare is a waitress at a busy breakfast café in New York, where she meets Reilly (an unmistakeable Roscoe Karns). Reilly is a newspaperman, except that he's gotten fired from pretty much every paper in the city, and with a depression still on, he's out of a job and doesn't really have the money to be in a café like this. When Mabel is asked to return an order of eggs from a different customer, she gives them to Reilly, something which ultimately gets her fired. Reilly decides he's going to become a PR man and get Mabel a job on Broadway.

Jake Sherman (Walter Catlett) is producing a new play on Broadway, and when the lead actress quits, Reilly badgers Sherman into letting Mabel have an audition, even though she really can't sing or dance particularly well. Somehow, it works, and she gets the lead, although she's going to have to practice a lot with the male lead Ronny (David Carlyle). They get a hotel suite for this, which is where Clark Gable comes in.

He plays Larry Cain, a heavyweight boxer who is in New York to prepare for his world championship fight. He's got a cushy hotel suite, except that it happens to be exactly one floor under Mabel's, and her constant dancing is keeping him up until all hours of the night. So he confronts Mabel, and the two immediately hate each other.

But you know it's not going to end there. Mabel's show goes on, but it's not particularly successful thanks to her not having any star power. Cain eventually becomes champion, but he has no charisma such that his fights are sparsely attended and he doesn't make much money. Reilly, being a PR man, has the brilliant idea of putting these two together in a romantic relationship (or at least the semblance of one) for the papers, as this will give both of them a positive boost in popularity. Of course, he doesn't realize that the two have already met (although they know each other only on sight) and hate each other. So when they finally realize who they're being set up with, they're not happy.

Once again, however, you know it's not going to end there. The two are going to find out that the other isn't really what they seem -- it wasn't Mabel's idea to become a Broadway actress and Cain would really rather open up a service station. And when they find that out, they're going to fall in love with each other. But that threatens to end their public careers, which everybody in their entourages can't have, so they try to put a spanner into the works.

Cain and Mabel is a pleasant enough romantic comedy, but for the most part one where you know exactly where it's going. Everybody does a good enough job with their roles; among the recognizable faces I haven't mentioned before are Allen Jenkins as one of Cain's trainers, and Ruth Donnelly as Mabel's aunt. The one big problem was the presence of a couple of musical numbers that really brought the movie to a screeching halt.

Still, Marion Davies always deserves more positive attention, and apart from the musical numbers Cain and Mabel is a definitely worthwhile watch.