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If there is any fly in the scented ointment of Jean Harlow's current celebrity, it is her occasional dissatisfaction with the character which her appearance and her mother, by a sort of conspiracy of nature and circumstance, have built up for her. Her determination to achieve a form of self-expression distinct from the one she has achieved on the screen shows itself in different ways. For her game of "Murder Mystery," she prefers writers as opponents, as she believes they think up the best crimes. She herself wants to write and spent last year completing a novel called Today is Tonight which has not yet gone to a publisher. Well aware of the part that decolletage has played in her career, she also knows that the personal accomplishment which Hollywood prizes above all others is wit and it distresses her sometimes to find that, however invaluable her sense of the comic may be on the screen, she rarely gets credit for it elsewhere.
Last week at a party, when she made what she considered a bright remark, the person to whom she was speaking asked: "Who did you hear say that?" Jean Harlow paused bitterly before making another remark which was both brighter and indubitably her own: "My God, must I always wear a low-cut dress to be important?"
The Farmer Takes a Wife (Fox). If cinema producers ever learn to use color without giving the impression that they consider it a Holly wood invention this is the sort of picture which it will most notably enhance. However, even in black & white, The Farmer Takes a Wife is easily an improvement, in scope and movement, upon the play, based on Walter D. Edmond's novel Rome Hani, from which Edwin Burke derived it. Essentially, it is less a story than the portrait of a place and a period—the Erie Canal, a quarter of a century after it was opened in 1825. To shrewd observers, it was even then apparent that the canal, as the main freight route between the Midwest and the sea, was doomed by the railroads.
The Erie boaters, for whom the "canawl" was a way of life as well as a waterway, preferred to ignore this threat to a picaresque existence which was the more pleasant because it was so leisurely, the more adventurous because it contrasted so sharply with the sleepy green countryside through which the horses pulled the boats. Against a detailed and wholly charming background, made up of boaters' quarrels and friendships, their odd songs and foolish curses, their contempt for hogs as cargo, their obstreperous pride in getting drunk and having fights, the picture outlines an incident which fits perfectly into the nostalgic mood which its surroundings have produced. It is the surprisingly touching story of a farm boy (Henry Fonda), working as a boater because he wants money to buy land, and a girl (Janet Gaynor) who finds it difficult though not impossible to love a man who does not worship the canal where she has been born & bred.