Word: lombardic
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...They had more than love-they had fun." So say the ads for Gable and Lombard. Unbelievably, there is more historical truth-which is to say, the barest acceptable minimum-in that simple adman's conceit than there is in the entire length of the vulgar, banal and finally repulsive movie it is designed to promote...
...flights. Both appear to have been unpretentious people, genuinely surprised-and moved-by their luck at finding one another in the marital climate of haute Hollywood in the late '30s. Others, alternately freezing and frying in that weird weather, were apparently much comforted by the example Gable and Lombard...
...film about a good match prevailing against the odds-sort of like seeing a re-release of a Nick and Nora Charles picture. But it would have required the wit and style that informed the inexpensively made Thin Man films and other light, sophisticated romances, some of which starred Lombard herself. These qualities, once so readily found in American movies, have now vanished. A cloddish script slams at us single-entendre jokes about sex. Doltish direction hammers them home with the sweaty desperation of a bad nightclub comic whose act is dying. The stars were discovered on television. James Brolin...
There are minor historical howlers, and the lighting is so inept that in one key scene Lombard's shadow falls on Gable's face, blocking out his reactions...
What makes the film perversely interesting is the one quite novel way it has found to be bad. Gable was married when he met Lombard and apparently suffered the usual expensive difficulties that the newly rich have in shedding the mate who shared all the early struggles. Meantime, he and Lombard discreetly lived together until the lawyers could do their work...