Olivia @ 100: It's Love I'm After
Sunday, June 19, 2016 at 12:27PM We're counting down to Olivia de Havilland's historic 100th birthday (July 1st!). Here's Josh...
Is there a film star in history who could stare doe-eyed better than Olivia de Havilland? Or anyone who delivered a line with seething bitterness through a smile better than Bette Davis? The rarely seen 1937 comedy It’s Love I’m After offers an early showcase of both women doing what they do best before their long careers to come. Davis was in the process of reaching mega-stardom, and de Havilland was unknowingly just one year away from taking Hollywood by storm opposite Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood. It’s Love I’m After was a chance for both of them to show off their comedic chops in the screwball era. It was also the first of the many collaborations between the two women...
It’s Love I’m After is about two actors Basil and Joyce (Leslie Howard reuniting with Davis, his Of Human Bondage downfall) who are dramatic by nature and by profession. Their frequent spats have gotten in the way of the many promised weddings. Basil’s biggest fan Marcia (de Havilland) is desperately infatuated with him, which is impeding her own pending nuptials. Basil’s solution to absolve himself of previous misdeeds is to trick Marcia into thinking he’s a despicable person. Of course, not all goes to plan.
With direction by Archie L Mayo, rapid dialogue and tomfoolery the running time flies by. The comedy is bursting with a sense of fun we rarely see in comedies now. Davis gets effortless zingers that roll off her tongue whilst de Havilland is clearly having a ball squeaking and hamming up her fan-girl role. For Davis in particular, a knowing viewer can enjoy her stage diva who is sent into rages with jealousy knowing the career defining character of Margot Channing in All About Eve is around a long corner, 13 years away. Although age and cigarettes haven’t quite yet added Davis’s husky voice to the divine tapestry that is to come.
Basil and Joyce are constantly quoting famous plays, and pitching plots of plays they’ve been in in their scheming. There’s an inherent and knowing theatricality to the whole film that serves the foolishness well. It’s easy to imagine a stage adaptation, and the actors are all playing to the rafters. The laughs are thick and fast, and though the style has dated leaving It’s Love I’m After out of the traditional canon of comedy classics, it’s a gem. That's particulary true when you think of how gleefully these new screen stars are poking fun at the medium that film was still reliant on but surpassing in cultural prominence, and the enormous legacy they themselves were just beginning to build.
Reader Comments (5)
This is a fun comedy, although not a top-level classic. I've read that Davis wasn't too excited about the project and I think that it shows in her performance. However, Howard, de Havilland, and especially Eric Blore, play it with energy and a good sense of fun. De Havilland cornered the market on silly heiresses at Warner Brothers, but it's interesting that her greatest heiress performance would come in a film of a dramatically different tone in 1949.
This offered a pleasant chance for all of the three leads to break out from their usual heavy duty dramas, though Olivia did find herself handed lighter fare on a regular basis than the other two.
There is a great deal of a dry run for Margo Channing in Joyce for Bette but that actually adds some fun to the film. Not great art but for three actors not known for their comic films a nice change of pace.
I wish Leslie Howard had done more light comedy
This is why I love this blog. I hadn't heard of this film before. But I've just bought the DVD on Amazon, and I'm looking forward to sitting down and watching it.
This is one of my favorite films with Olivia de Havilland, I had to buy the DVD soon after seeing it. She's so good as an obsessed fangirl, her character could've been easily obnoxious but she's perfectly endearing. The rest of the cast is of course brilliant too, Leslie Howard worked well off of Bette Davis and Eric Blore. I also love the Clark Gable line between Olivia and Leslie, especially considering all three starred in Gone with the Wind a couple years later.