Ladies Man - 1931

William Powell, Kay Francis and Carol Lombard

A gigalo finds life more and more complicated as the women around him multiply

This Early "talkie" with a primitive handling of audio and especially the pacing of dialogue. Film studios were still getting used to how to make the new technology work effectively on screen, and the speaking of dialogue back and forth between actors simply wasn't anything like silent film's title cards, but the new "talkies" couldn't be like a stage play either. The third problem here is that editing had yet to figure out that cutting dead space might be worthwhile, instead we get a lot of lines being launched by one actor, then a pause occurs that feels like the other actor is trying to remember their lines and respond while the camera does nothing but wait and watch, often just shooting down the center of a room while the characters stand in middle ground without moving (the director here is Lothar Mendes). The pauses might be the actor trying to portray circumspection about their next piece of dialogue, but since the camera isn't close enough to see an accompanying expression to define the silence, we instead get the sensation of a car puttering up hill while someone is tapping the brakes.

All that aside, the performances by the cast frequently snap to life when these dead space interruptions aren't plaguing the speed of the story, particularly Carol Lombard as a young woman infatuated with William Powell (as Jamie Darricott). As receptive as he appears to be to her affection, there's a huge problem: Darricott is preoccupied (and being kept by) Lombard's character's mother, the wealthy Mrs. Fendley (Olive Tell) who has a very distracted husband (Gilbert Emery as Horace Fendley) who is just glad she's off somewhere else and not bugging him while he is making fantastic sums in banking. Olive Tell plays a straight version of the kind of stuffy Grande dame that Margaret Dumont would caricature in Marx Bros' movies, but as the story in Ladies Man grows darker, Tell effectively portrays the twin terrors of public humiliation and a building fear of her husband finding out what she's been up to.

Lombard's character is lively but also going slowly off her rocker (she is drinking alcohol heavily so that doesn't help) because she can't obtain Darricott for her own, and she is pressuring Darricott to break things off with Mom Fendley or else she's going to spill the beans to her Dad. On top of that, everyone (except Dad Fendley) in their society set seems to know the truth about what's going on between gigolo Darricott and the famously wealthy Mrs. Fendley, and then in walks Kay Francis. Now it's Darricott's turn to be smitten.

Lombard puts a lot of real cinematic energy into her portrayal of a spoiled rich girl who is becoming increasingly dangerous when it looks like she can't get what she wants, which is simply a marriage proposal from Darricott. Lombard's performance shows a sort of madness racheting upward, and her fireworks (and especially her speed at communicating all this) are in a big contrast to the measured acting from nearly everyone else. The technology might still be trying to figure out how to do talkies, but not Lombard.

Kay Francis, with an acting style that simply smoothly pours itself across her scenes, plays a character who wants to stay clear of the huge scandal brewing and get out of town quickly. But, well, she'd also like for Powell's character to straighten himself out and exit the dirty business he is in and then come along with her. In this way, Francis's character (as Norma Page) is a nice, calm counter-balance to all the building fury over on the Fendley side of things.

A youngish William Powell shows off in Ladies Man many of the attributes that made him such a huge star later into the 1930's, but here he's so pulled back inside of himself he seems to be equating the role of gigolo to the role of being a butler, a sort of love servant who is simply administering to the direct needs and implied emotional wants of a clientele of women, something that the script (by Rupert Hughes and Herman J. Mankiewicz) takes time to explain in a bit of much needed exposition when Darricott needs to make new friend Norma (Kay Francis) to understand the mess he has gotten into. This somewhat sympathetic (or self-serving) self-portrait of a guy who has the problem of women throwing themselves at him (except for Kay!) means we can feel sorry for him and hope he gets his tuckas out of town before all this "love" hits the fan, so there's a tension building as we see all the different characters converging on our lead male actor in his modern, "hip" 1930 bachelor pad.

Without Lombard, Powell and Kay Francis on board, Ladies Man would be at best an antique document of early talkies' tech and the dilemma of early 20th century morality playing out into a looser art deco 1930's youth environment. But with these three we get a frozen-in-time melodramatic picture of crisis in the high social caste. The creeping public exposure makes even "the rich" to reckon with following the established procedural rules for speeding through divorce and remarriage at the proper time and in the proper order. But everyone wants what they want and they want it right now; and it just can't work that way.

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Original Page October 15, 2025