Personal Property

Personal Property was Jean Harlow's penultimate film, and while it has a good idea for a film, it falls short of executing it, even though is was directed by W. S. Van Dyke, who also directed The Thin Man.

The premise is that a pompous British manufacturer of ladies' underwear (Reginald Owen) is marrying an American widow (Harlow) for her money. Only she doesn't have any, and she's marrying Owen for his money. Meanwhile, Owen's dissolute brother, Robert Taylor, is released from prison. Owen and their father are disgraced by him, but his mother has a very soft spot for him.

Taylor, out at his usual club, spots Harlow. Not knowing she's his brother's fiancee, he falls in love at first sight, even though she wants nothing to do with him, and he later thinks she's married. He behaves in a way we would call creepy today: stealing her friend's ticket to the opera so he and Harlow end up in the same box, and then following her home. He gets into her house by getting a job as a sheriff's officer. It seems that in England back then if you owed money somebody could stay in your house and make sure you didn't take anything out until they paid the bill.

The film ends with a long set piece that has Owen and his parents coming to meet Harlow. She doesn't want them to know there's a sheriff in her house, so Taylor, eager to get on her good side, pretends to be her butler. Thus we have the comic situation of Owen, knowing the butler is his good-for-nothing brother, but unable to tell Harlow because he doesn't want her to know he has a jailbird for a brother. Taylor has the upper hand, is able to foist indignities on Owen, much to his mother's delight.

Of course, as he know from the poster, Harlow and Taylor will end up together.

Personal Property could have been a much better movie. The final scene, rife with possibility, is not nearly madcap enough. Harlow, already ill with the disease that would kill her, seems subdued. Taylor is quite suave, but it's amusing that he doesn't even try an English accent, even though there's a funny running gag about an upper-crust Brit who speaks in mumbles, though the other English can understand him.

It's not a bad film, but it seems only half-baked, as if everyone was just there to collect a paycheck. Only Owen, who is best known for playing Scrooge in the 1938 version of A Christmas Carol, and also played both Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, acts with the fury of a thousand beasts. His character is like man who has overdosed on espresso.