To Please a Lady

Another of the movies that I've had sitting on my DVR for a couple of months is To Please a Lady. Recently, I finally got around to watching it in order to be able to do a review on it here.

After the opening credits, the camera focuses on a poster advertising "Regina Forbes, America's Leading Woman Columnist". Forbes is played by Barbara Stanwyck, and she's in the office with her editor, Gregg (Adolphe Menjou). They're watching a TV promo about Mike Brannan (Clark Gable), a racecar driver who drives all sorts of cars to make a living. The promo points out that he's become successful, but he's also now the villain because he'll do anything to win, not that they had the word kayfabe in those days. In any case, Gregg thinks Brannon would be a perfect person for Regina to do her next column on.

Regina and Gregg go out to Newark to the midget car track where Brannan is racing this week. Brannan is good and knows it, and as a result treats Regina with all the respect he deserves, which is not much but also about as much as he'd give to any writer not already in the racing world. It's an attitude that turns Regina off to Brannan. She and Gregg stay in the stands to watch the race, which is rather an eventful one. Brannon and another driver are in a fight for the lead, having lapped other cars that are much slower. In an attempt to lap another car, there's enough of an accident that Brannan's rival crashes off the track, eventually dying from his injuries. Regina is ruthless in her column, and Brannan finds that he's unable to race anywhere.

Some time later, Gregg reads a newspaper article mentioning how Brannan has been blackballed from racing, and is now a trick driver at the sort of traveling carnival that, a generation earlier, would have featured stunt pilots who would have been lionized in early talkies. Regina feigns disinterest, but you get the feeling she was so turned on by Brannan's bad boy act back in Newark that she just has to go to the carnival when it shows up in the New York area. Not only that, but she goes over to see Brannan after the show even though he seems to be pursuing one of the women working in the carnival.

Regina is clearly falling for Brannan, although he certainly doesn't return the favor at first. And he's got good reason to be pissed at her. But he thinks he's finally earned enough money to try to get back into racing, and this time big time racing as in the Indianapolis 500, which was the Great American Race back in thos days. But you know that eventually Brannan is going to thaw and start having feelings of his own for Regina.

It takes some time as Brannan goes back up the ranks, and Regina is also forced to re-examine herself when another person she wrote a nasty column about decides to commit suicide rather than face a prison sentence resulting from one of Regina's poison-pen columns. Brannan and Regina may finally be able to accept each other for who they are, but the relationship is going to have to survive Brannan's attempt to win the Indy 500.

I've mentioned in the past how I think MGM was quite good at doing literary adaptions and costume dramas. However, there were certain genres they weren't as good at, and To Please a Lady falls squarely into that latter half. It doesn't help that the movie was made in 1950. Gable and Stanwyck were both much too old for their roles, Gable in particular. Plus, tastes were changing after World War II and To Please a Lady feels a lot like the sort of auto racing movie that would have been done in the pre-war years. The script also doesn't do any of the stars any favors.

To Please a Lady may be of interest to fans of either Clark Gable or Barbara Stanwyck, but it's not a terribly good film.