Ready for Love (1934) User Reviews

Ida Lupino is ready for anything in this comedy drama

[robert-temple-1 · 7/10 · 24 October 2012]

This is a charming and entertaining film starring Ida Lupino aged 16, who had already been in films for three years but still did not look like the Ida Lupino we know as a grownup. At this stage she really was a 'kid', but an especially lively and dynamic one. This film is a comedy drama, and one of the two screenwriters (J. P. McEvoy and William Slavens McNutt, though we don't know which one) peppered the script with many extremely funny one-liners, so that the dialogue crackles delightfully, and there is many a wry laugh to be had, and some belly laughs as well. I have seen this film on a collector's DVD made from a pale print of no great quality, and it is possible that the negative does not survive, though it should do, as it was a Paramount picture. Like so many others, it is probably languishing in a vault. The film begins with Ida running away from her boarding school for girls to rejoin her mother (played by Marjorie Rambeau), an actress in a New York theatre. But her Ma wants her to be more respectable, so sends her to her live with her own sister, a retired actress of modest means, in a small town in Idaho. Ida loves her little dog, who is taken away from her in the sleeping car on the train by the conductor and put into the baggage car, from which he leaps and is lost. This results in Ida arriving at the town and leaving the train in floods of tears, sobbing 'I miss my Booboo'. Unknown to her, the same train has brought the coffin of the black sheep of the town's leading family who has just died of drink and who was known for his amours. A journalist (played by Richard Arlen) reports a story on the front page of the local paper named The Clarion saying that Ida was his mistress and her Booboo was the dead man (as he is unaware of the fact that Booboo was really a dog). This leads to a series of dramatic and hysterical events, where the town's most prestigious and domineering rich family commences a campaign of threats and intimidation against the teenaged Ida, saying they will sue her and demanding that she leave town at once. It all becomes very nasty, with the grande dame played with great menace by Beulah Bondi insulting Ida every which way, supported by her lawyer and other family supporters. The journalist realizes something is amiss, and begins to fall for Ida, so that a romance blossoms. Meanwhile, many older men keep approaching Ida with nudges and winks, suggesting eternal friendship or some semblance on it. The only bad performance in this film is by Junior Durkin, credited here by his real name of Trent Durkin. As I have pointed out in my review of his first film appearance in TOM SAWYER (1930), he was no good at playing Huckleberry Finn. Here he is much worse. He plays the young son of the grande dame, who wants to be a poet and composes terrible verses, and also falls for Ida. But he simply cannot act. He hams it up in the most outrageous fashion, and he should really have been restrained by the director, if not fired, for his performance is simply awful. The director of this film was a strange Russian named Marion Gering (1901-1977), who directed 16 feature films between 1931 and 1950. He had come to America in 1924 as a delegate of a Soviet trade commission and defected. He was thus a most unlikely director of Edward G. Robinson in a very strange film indeed, THUNDER IN THE CITY (1937), about a capitalist entrepeneur in London. Possibly Gering's best known film is THIRTY DAY PRINCESS (1934), another light-hearted charmer made immediately before READY FOR LOVE, with Cary Grant and Sylvia Sidney (who was half Russian and half Romanian). This film provides plenty of opportunity for satire about small towns and their disdain of actresses, their social snobbery, their dominance by rich families, and their ready ignoring of basic principles of justice. In one scene, a mob of wild women led by Beulah Bondi besiege Ida at a public picnic in the town park and start torturing her by dunking her repeatedly in the adjoining river. So there is a savage side to the story, even though it is treated comedically. But the spirit of this film is very much that of a Hollywood a comedy drama. The journalist saves Ida from the female mob, and the tale has various unexpected twists and turns. It is all very entertaining, and must have taken people's mind off the Great Depression for the whole 77 minutes at the time of release. I see that no one else has ever reviewed this film, which shows how rare it must be, which is a shame.

The evils of gossip get a comic treatment.

[mark.waltz · 7/10 · 11 July 2019]

It's Beulah Bondi here, or at least her haridan character, who needs to get the good dunking, or given a reminder of the Book of James on the evils of "the tongue". she is the leader of a puritanical group of women who take it upon themselves to handle sinner Ida Lupino whom they believe is a fallen woman. She's actually just a bit independent-minded, having grown up with an actress mother (Marjorie Rambeau) who would like nothing more than her daughter to actually be a lady even though there are no lady like qualities in the crude mother. Lupino runs away from school to visit her mother and is promptly sent to visit her aunt (Kathleen Howard) who lives in this puritanical town and wants nothing to do with the social scene.

Young reporter Richard Arlen reports a story on Lupino which he does not get proof of and this sets the ladies tongues wagging, ultimately leading the envious Bondi to have Lupino dunked in a puritanical ritual to cleanse her of her "sins". Bondi's husband (Ralph Remley) handles his wife, while the arrival of Rambeau stirs up more issues as she handles the press. There's also Junior Durkin as Bondi's son, flirting with Lupino in a way that just makes his mother's dated ideas drive her even more crazy.

I've never seen a film like this, even though there have been many films that deal with the evils of gossip. The dunking seen itself is not something to laugh at, but the follow-up where Bondi gets her just desserts certainly is. At this time, the veteran character actress was known for her screen gossips, having played a really hideous one in the earlier "Street Scene". No wonder the actress went out of her way to lighten her image to play loving mothers and even wear aged makeup to play feisty senior citizens a good 30 years older than herself.

Young Lupino, then arising starlet who would not hit complete screen fame until the end of the decade, gets to show some of the moxy that she would later utilize in those tough talking Warner Brothers film noir. Arlen, with his high-pitched voice, comes off a bit odd in the leading romantic role as a big-city reporter slumming It In the sticks. Rambeau makes the most of a basically unsympathetic role, making her quite formidable to watch even though she is playing a rather trashy and horrid character. I'm not sure that this actually can be called a pre-code comedy as the subjects it deals with are not necessarily scandalous and there is nothing shocking outside of the unfortunate violent act committed in the name of religion. It's still a curiosity worth searching out because it certainly ranks as one of the most unique 1930's films I've ever seen.