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Sunday January 12, 2025
Movie Review: Three Wise Girls (1932)
Unfortunately, they didn't scoff at love, laugh at marriage or live for luxury alone: 0-3.
WARNING: SPOILERS
The women of “The Public Enemy” (Harlow! Clarke!) are reunited here as small-town girls who go to the big city to earn money and avoid assholes. They do better with the former.
As the movie opens, Gladys (Mae Clarke) is already in New York, and showers mom back in Chillicothe, Ohio, with gifts from her $200-a-week gig. Meanwhile, Cassie (Jean Harlow) is making $15 as a soda jerk, and that ain't cutting it, so she goes, too. The move merely gets her a different soda-jerk job, where, one day, she makes a Bromo-Selzer and engages in weak repartee with a hungover Jerry (Walter Byron), whose redeeming quality is he’s not handsy:
Jerry: Oh, go away. I hate blondes.
Cassie: Well, I hate drunks, so that makes us even.
One Frenchman
Eventually she seeks out Gladys, who is working as a model for a department store, and who gets a swell idea. Why doesn’t Cassie work with her! This is less runway modeling than showing off clothes to dept. store customers. Amusingly, the snooty French boss rejects Cassie—who is, after all, Jean Harlow—when she overdoes the hips in her tryout. But Gladys is determined. “Listen, when you walk, forget you have hips,” she says. “Let them take care of themselves—they always do.” She also plays off the big Sophie Tucker hit of the day. “I’m going to show him there’s one Frenchman that can be wrong.” Then she dresses up Cassie in haute couture, Frenchie is amazed, gig gotten.
So where the drama for the rest of the movie? Love, love, love.
Gladys has fallen for Arthur (Jameson Thomas), who looks like a B-movie villain and acts accordingly. He’s a real lout, who’s already married but claims he’s trying to get out of it. Except when Gladys innocently/stupidly introduces him to Cassie (who is, after all, Jean Harlow), he makes a play for her.
Meanwhile, Jerry returns to the picture. He’s the nicer version of Arthur, and, even with Gladys warning her all the while about men and love, Cassie falls for him. Guess what? He’s married, too! To the patrician Ruth (Natalie Moorhead, the awful wife of “The Office Wife”), who refuses to grant him a divorce now that he wants one. She’s that type.
Get it? Gladys, who's fallen for a lout, keeps warning Cassie about men, even though she's fallen for a not-lout. That’s the movie. Gladys wrings her hands, Cassie snaps her gum, and Cassie’s roommate Dot (silent movie star Marie Prevost) tries to provide comic relief as the plain girl with the work-from-home typing job who falls for Jerry’s chauffeur (Andy Devine). She also reminds Gladys that there’s a Depression going on:
Dot: Say, the trouble with you is, you’ve forgotten how awful it is to live in a dump like this. You don't know what it means to have to cut down on your food, so you can scrap together the rent or else old horse-face downstairs will throw you out on your whatsit. Listen, did you ever have to eat liverwurst seven days a week, cause you couldn't afford anything else? Well, try it sometime, you'll be nuts about it.
Gladys: You got to hang onto your self respect, Dot. And that's important.
Dot: Aw, what's your self respect when your hungry? It won't get you a porterhouse, will it?
Dot doesn’t listen. And when crummy old Arthur renews his vows to his wife (which somehow makes the front page of The New York Sun), she takes poison and kills herself. That prompts Cassie to return to the soda fountain at Chillicothe, where, behind a newspaper, a man orders a Bromo-Seltzer. Guess who? And guess what the newspaper headline reads? Yep, it’s Jerry, the hed is all about his divorce. Big smooch. The end.
Two deaths
It’s Columbia Pictures—apparently the last time MGM loaned out Harlow—and the movie doesn’t have the wit or snap of precode Warner Bros. Probably doesn’t help that it was directed by William Beaudine, who made 179 features during his career, and was famous, or infamous, for doing them quickly. This one took three weeks in October 1931, per AFI.
Even the title is bad. “Three Wise Girls”? What’s wise about them? The novel is called, “Blonde Baby,” way better, but apparently the Hays Office nixed it and Columbia caved. Or maybe Columbia was worried about the many “blonde” titles from the period: “Platinum Blonde” (with Harlow), “Blonde Crazy” (with Cagney), “Blonde Captive” (exploitation doc from Lowell Thomas). They also turned Cassie into a good girl—in the novel, she knowingly sleeps with a married man. But it is precode so everyone and Cassie’s mother tell Harlow to take off her clothes. And she obliges. Within limits, Poindexter.
The one wise girl who dies young here, Clarke, lived longest in real life—until 1992. The other two ended tragically. Provost had been a silent leading lady but gained weight in her thirties, relegating her to roles like this; and when she tried to regain her figure, she died from a combination of malnutrition and alcoholism. That was in January 1937. Six months later, Harlow died suddenly of uremic poisoning—the same disease that would get director Beaudine in 1970.