Hold Your Man

Another person honored last August in TCM's Summer Under the Stars was Jean Harlow, and somewhat surprisingly considering how she died tragically young there are some of her movies I hadn't seen yet. One of those was Hold Your Man. So I recorded it and recently got around to watching it to do the review here.

We don't see Harlow for several minutes, because we first have a scene with the film's male star, Clark Gable. He plays Eddie Hall, a small time con artist. He's pulling off a con as the movie opens, involving finding a lost wallet with a ring in it that he knows is a fake ring although the mark doesn't. Eventually, the mark catches on, forcing Eddie to beat a hasty retreat. He goes into an apartment building and tries the doors, eventually finding one that's open. When he opens the bathroom door, however, he finds a woman taking a bath! That woman is Ruby Adams (Jean Harlow), and she doesn't give Eddie up to the police.

It doesn't take long from listening to the conversation that Ruby also uses her wits to make her way in the world what with the Depression on. You can also guess that since they've got a con streak in them, they're also going to wind up working together, and even in love. For Ruby, this is only the latest in a series of men; she's also got a current admirer in Al (Stuart Erwin) who meets Eddie when she takes Al to the speakesy Eddie mentioned to her. Eddie clips Al and Ruby isn't happy about it even though just a few minutes earlier she too had tried to con Al.

As I said they wind up working together, but things go wrong because one of the schemes involves blackmailing rich married men the sort of same way the two young lovers in the later Japanese movie Cruel Story of Youth did. Eddie, by now in love with Ruby, isn't particuarly happy with the idea, and when the scheme starts going south it winds up in a scuffle in which Eddie hits the guy, concussing him and causing a fall in which the guy dies. So Eddie has to escape, and the suspicion falls on Ruby since the guy is dead right outside her apartment. She gets sentenced to the women's reformatory for it.

Two other things complicate matters. One is that, in the dorm-like setting of the reformatory, Ruby is in a room with several other women, one of whom is Gypsy, a former girlfriend of Eddie's. The more important one is that Ruby discovers she's pregnant, although at least she knows Eddie's the father. Eddie wants to visit Ruby, and hopefully marry her so that they can take care of the child together after she gets out of prison, but of course he's a fugitive (and a parolee) himself so going to visit her in prison of all places is a big risk.

Hold Your Man was released in 1933 and as such is a pre-Code. At the same time, however, it's not quite as strongly a pre-Code as movies from 1931 and 1932, as the movie tries to have Eddie and Ruby get married and of course has Ruby in prison. At the same time, I don't think the ending would have gotten by the censors a year later. Hold Your Man is in some ways all over the place, but in an interesting way. The presence of Clark Gable and Jean Harlow also makes Hold Your Man well worth watching.