1935’s Hands Across the Table puts a slight spin on the screwball comedy trope of the female gold digger and puts a small spin on it by adding a male opportunist and having the two schemers fall in love.
These roles are filled by Carole Lombard and Fred MacMurray. She’s a manicurist at an upscale hotel, and she has so little tact in her approach to landing a wealthy man that her first question to each male customer is whether they are married. He’s somebody who wants to maintain a life of leisure but whose formerly wealthy family was decimated by the stock market crash.
Their meet-cute isn’t very cute at all. She had already encountered him playing hopscotch in one of the hotel’s hallways before she knew who he was and dismissed him immediately. Then she returns to the salon only to discover the wealthy client who is to be her next customer is MacMurray’s Theodore Drew III. I was amused by a co-worker’s response to Lombard’s query as to whether the three means anything: “Only that he has a grandfather.”
In her nervousness, she proceeds to do so much damage to his fingers that he ends up with bandages on six of them. I found it odd she has no difficulties attending to the genuinely wealthy Ralph Belamy when she gives him his daily manicure in his room. Perhaps his confinement to a wheelchair makes him an unlikely candidate for romance. Unfortunately for him, he is thoroughly smitten and is warming up to proposing.
MacMurray and Lombard go on a date, and he ends up passed out drunk in her apartment. A consequence of this is he has missed a boat to Bermuda. Given his high-society fiancée (Astrid Allwyn) believes he is on that trip, he ropes in Lombard on a ruse which involves such elements as faked call to Allwyn that is supposed placed from the island. In the meantime, he is staying at her apartment, where she assists in various ways, including renting a tanning lamp, so it will superficially appear he has been in sunnier climes.
Few of the attempts at humor in this film worked for me, and I keep thinking back to that tanning lamp when I consider why the gags are largely unsuccessful. Lombard tells MacMurray she couldn’t remember if he was supposed to bake under it for 15 or 50 minutes a side. That feels like a setup for him to inevitably get severely sunburned, only there’s no payoff.
Not that it will fool Allwyn, regardless. Her character is smarter than this kind of fare would normally make such a character. Baffled by the call to her from “Bermuda”, she has the operator trace it back to its New York origins. Unfortunately, the script still largely treats her as a somebody aloof and oblivious, with her making remarks such as this while watching a model demonstrate a heavy and excessively ornamented dress: “That would be perfect for my pyramid trip by camel.”
More sympathy is extended towards Belamy’s character, but I’m not sure as to what purpose. He is clearly a better human being than MacMurray’s character, though you know from the onset he will not possibly end up with Lombard at the end.
The real reason to see this is Lombard. I find it fascinating to see a beautiful woman who had such a great, goofy laugh. It is a weird juxtaposition that I think is a large part of her enduring appeal.
Like so many movies, Hands Across the Table those in minor roles were consistently more interesting than our leads. In particular, Marie Prevost is underused as Lombard’s ditzy co-worker. Prevost was once a huge star in the silent film era, only to die destitute of alcohol poisoning two years after this was released. Sadly, she is best known today for a likely apocryphal element of her demise, and that was her dog partly consuming her corpse before it was discovered. Whether or not that was true, a more tasteful coda we do know to be fact was Joan Crawford paid for her funeral.
Dir: Mitchell Leisen
Starring Carole Lombard, Fred MacMurray, Ralph Belamy
Watched as part of the Kino Lorber box set Carole Lombard Collection