HeathCliff-2 Review of Love Is News

Love Is News (1937)

Wrong actors and director to handle screwball comedy - This could have been good

[5/10 · 19 December 2009]

While watching Love is News, what I wished for was that this film would have been cast and directed by a whole different team. Because I like screwball comedy, it's hard to do, and requires a finesse, a light touch, and a specific feather tone from both director and actors to handle delicate material - like a soufflé - a little bit too heavy- handed, and it falls flat. With the exception of Slim Summerville as the small-town judge, the performances were uniformly bad. None of the very young and green principals knew how to handle comedy - so they just went broad and big - Don Ameche bellowed, Loretta grinned and mugged, and Tyrone Power was over-animated. Of course it was the director's fault - pump it up, give me bigger, bigger. But he was dealing with actors who were not natural comedians, whose charms were more in smaller gestures. I kept dreaming of the usual stable who could handle the material - Jean Arthur, Carole Lombard, Cary Grant, Melvyn Douglas - because the storyline was fun and sillilly amusing - an heiress turns the tables on a reporter, and decides to put him under the glare of publicity by planting a false story. I watched it all the way through, seeing potential in the script, and wishing it had been at another studio and cast differently, with a different director. I think it could have been a classic. There were priceless moments, from the fake car crash, to the jail scene, the airport scene - that with the right actors and a director like Mitchell Leisen or Greg LaCava or Howard Hawkes could have catapulted this film in a minor classic instead of an ersatz version of the classic screwballs by people who knew how to do it