Cain and Mabel ** (1936, Marion Davies, Clark Gable, Allen Jenkins) – Classic Movie Review 10,138

Marion Davies called for her previous co-star Clark Gable to support her again on the 1936 musical comedy film Cain and Mabel, and money was no object  – they literally raised the roof.

Clark Gable (looking young but weird without his moustache) co-stars as a heavyweight champion boxer called Larry Cain, in this impressively lavish but only moderate romantic musical comedy vehicle for Marion Davies, who plays Mabel O’Dare, a Broadway musical star involved in a publicity-stunt love-affair with boxer Larry to boost their waning popularity in the tabloids.

Director Lloyd Bacon’s 1936 Cain and Mabel clearly has much hard work put into it all round, which gifts plenty of lift and vibrancy to Warner Bros’ no-expense-spared production. But the story is nearly as old as Cain and Abel, and though Davies can handle the amusing screwball comedy just fine, she can’t handle the Al Dubin – Harry Warren song and dance numbers (‘Coney Island’, ‘I’ll Sing You a Thousand Love Songs’, ‘Here Comes Chiquita’) so well. Gable is none too convincing as a boxer, and does not share great sexual chemistry with Davies.

Bobby Connolly was Oscar nominated for Best Dance Direction for ‘I’ll Sing You a Thousand Love Songs’, the incredibly elaborate climactic musical number that used 225 dancers and more than 2,000 ostrich feathers, plus over 100 pounds of large blocks of ice, as well as requiring the enlargement of Stage 7 (now Stage 16) on the Warner Bros lot. To accommodate the enormous sets, the roof and walls were raised by another 35 feet. Raising the stage 35 feet took four weeks and 200 workers, and cost $300,000, paid for by Marion Davies’s lover, the media magnate William Randolph Hearst. The set was lit by 600 arc lights, bringing temperatures to 110 degrees, with chorus girls sitting on the ice and still fainting.

The carousel used in the Coney Island number sequence was built for the film at a cost of $35,000. Marion Davies kept it for her Santa Monica home after. It is the longest musical number she performed in films.

The writers are Laird Doyle (screenplay) and H C Witwer (story). It is shot in black and white by George Barnes and produced by Sam Bischoff.

Davies and Gable previously starred together in Polly of the Circus (1932). Davies requested Gable as her co-star again even though he was under contract at MGM. Hearst convinced his old friend Jack L Warner, the Warner Bros studio head, to borrow Gable from MGM as Davies’s co-star. Hearst influenced the production generally, rejecting Dick Powell for the part Robert Paige plays as he thought Davies found Powell attractive.

Gable shaved his moustache for Mutiny on the Bounty but grew it back for San Francisco (1936).

Also in the cast are Allen Jenkins, Roscoe Karns, Walter Catlett, Hobart Cavanaugh, William Collier Sr, Robert Paige, Ruth Donnelly, Pert Kelton and E E Clive.

It is Davies’s penultimate movie, followed by Ever Since Eve (1937).

Allen Jenkins is fondly remembered as ‘Goldie’ Locke in The Gay Falcon, A Date with the Falcon and The Falcon Takes Over.

In the mid-Thirties, as Marion Davies’s stardom waned, Hearst’s movies began to haemorrhage money. To avoid bankruptcy, he had to accept a $1 million loan from Davies, who sold all her jewellery, stocks and bonds to raise the cash.

William Randolph Hearst’s life story is the main inspiration for Charles Foster Kane in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941).

Hearst was enraged at the thinly disguised and very unflattering portrait of him, and used his massive influence and resources to prevent the film from being released without even having seen it. Hearst and his Hollywood friends succeeded in pressuring cinema chains to limit showings of the film, damaging the box-office and Welles’s career.

The cast are Marion Davies as Mabel O’Dare, Clark Gable as Larry Cain, Allen Jenkins as Dodo, Roscoe Karns as Aloysius K Reilly, Walter Catlett as Jake Sherman, Robert Paige (credited as David Carlyle) as Ronny Cauldwell, Hobart Cavanaugh as the Stage Manager Milo,  Ruth Donnelly as Aunt Mimi, Pert Kelton as Toddy Williams, William Collier Sr as Pat “Pop” Walters, Sammy White as singer in ‘Coney Island’, E E Clive as Charles “Chuck” Fendwick, Allen Pomeroy as Boxer Tom Reed, Robert Middlemass as Cafe Proprietor Mr George, Joseph Crehan as Reed’s Manager, Charles Teske as a Dancer, and Marie Prevost as Sherman’s receptionist.

© Derek Winnert 2020 Classic Movie Review 10,138

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