Nothing Sacred

William Wellman made films in all genres (he even made a Tarzan picture) including one of the first examples of the screwball comedy, which became a staple of late-thirties and early-forties moviehouses. It was called Nothing Sacred, and was released in 1937.

The story centers on a newspaperman, Fredric March, who is in the doghouse with his editor (Walter Connolly, playing a character coincidentally named Oliver Stone) after a hoax is exposed (he was passing off a Harlem shoeshine-man as an Oriental sultan, a sequence that is unfortunately tinged with racism). March gets demoted to the obituary department, but spies an opportunity for redemption when he reads about a small-town girl who is dying of radium poisoning.

March goes to her Vermont town and runs into some taciturn Yankee hospitality (including a general store proprietress played by Margaret Hamilton, later the Wicked Witch of the West). He finally tracks down the girl, Hazel Flagg (Carole Lombard) and offers her an expense-paid trip to New York. She eagerly accepts, even though she knows that she is not dying--the town doctor, a drunken quack (Charles Winninger) misdiagnosed her.

Hazel becomes a big celebrity, and is toasted by everyone in New York for her courage. March falls in love with her, but of course we know that eventually she will be found out.

This film is viewed by many as a classic of the genre, but I was somewhat unimpressed. The script is certainly bouncy. Credited to Ben Hecht, a former newspaperman (he also wrote The Front Page and its remake, His Girl Friday), there were also uncredited contributions from some of the greatest wits of the era: Ring Lardner, George S. Kaufman, and Dorothy Parker among them. It's hard to top a line where a character is compared to a combination of a Ferris wheel and a werewolf. But it's interesting that Wellman, who so often used a moving camera, chooses to keep it static here. It's as if he's filming a play, and the lack of sense of movement leavened the zaniness.

The performances are wonderful, though, especially Lombard, who may have been the screen's greatest combination of beauty and comic ability. She would of course die in a plane crash on a trip selling war bonds during World War II.

This was just one of many films of the era to take a cynical gaze at journalism (Meet John Doe was another example). As a newspaperman, Hecht frequently made up stories, which is shall we say frowned upon. All of the "journalists" in this story are more interested in building up a story than presenting the truth.

As with A Star Is Born, Nothing Sacred is in bad need of restoration. The print is badly faded, and the Technicolor is now a pale watercolor. It was one of the first to use rear-projection and montage in Technicolor.