A Film Canon

 

 

Libeled Lady develops Capra's identification of banter with reportage, presenting a love triangle between chief editor Warren Haggerty (Spencer Tracy), his fiancee (Jean Harlow), and the paper for which he works. Not only has Haggerty repeatedly missed his marriage for the sake of a story, but he convinces his wife to enter into a sham marriage with ex-reporter Bill Chandler (William Powell), so that the latter can, in turn, enter into a sham affair with wealthy heiress (Myra Loy), allowing him to bring a libel against her that will cancel the one that she has brought against the paper. In other words, Conway magnifies and explicates the performative nature of publicly recognised relationships, which he squarely diagnoses as a symptom of the media, most memorably in the passive- aggressive, saccharine rituals that Harlow and Powell perform for the benefit of their intermittent audience. Yet both these performances end up seguing into reality, precluding the categorical rejection of the media that occurs in Mr. Deeds Goes To Town, while transforming it into an urban medium in such a way as to render the romantic distance of It Happened One Night similarly unavailable. In this vacuum, Conway charts Powell's conversational education at the hands of Loy, whose central revelation is that irreverence can be used for sympathetic, as well as solipsistic purposes; or, alternatively, that fast-talking runs the risk of ignoring its object altogether, transforming the tongue into so many approximations of the hyperactive, chattering printing presses that open the film. To this end, Conway departs from It Happened One Night's emphasis upon the road, drawing a more categorical distinction between city and country, and advocating a provisional return to the latter in order to confront the former on its own terms; that is, forcing Powell to measure his conversational fluidity - and that of the printing press - against the stream on Loy's rural estate, and to discover a more ethical, natural outlet for his 'angling' proclivities.