Talkies had topped silent films for about three years. The technique kept improving, but Hollywood was in need of words, and words were worth their weight in gold. In Hollywood everyone turned their eyes to Broadway, for inspiration or adulation; and many Broadway playwrights answered the call, because the Depression had interrupted more than just a few shows. In an unusual choice, Platinum Blonde was based on a story and screenplay written just for the screen. Working next to Jo Swerling this time was Robert Riskin (he wrote the dialogue), who had a record for writing for theater but had already been converted to the film world for some time; from this point on Riskin would become Capra’s “social conscience” and “moral attitude” (Joseph McBride), and together they would go on to create the narratives of a body of work extraordinarily popular, sealed in its time and unique. Capra and Riskin excelled from the start in a certain “ideological” observation of settings. Platinum Blonde tells the story of a journalist and an heiress, and its first scene takes place in the offices of a newspaper: these 1931 reporters, indebted to Hecht and MacArthur’s The Front Page, are already the Hollywood (and comic-strip as well, see Superman and Dick Tracy) parody of themselves, a figure that would continue to develop over the years: unkempt clothes and features, smokers, drinkers, quick to the point, speaking a rough and sometimes grammatically incorrect language. The Schuyler millionaires and their home on Long Island are luxuriously vacuous and crude, nothing at all like Lubitsch’s polished, airy sets; art déco pretensions clash with banal furniture and seem to indicate an American high society culturally quite confused. On the other hand, what can we say about that one-of-a-kind blonde icon that floats down the stairs and in the rooms, that feline bombshell without a touch of class, this brilliant mis- casting that has Jean Harlow, still the voluptuous daughter of a dentist from Kansas City, in the role of a sophisticated heiress? No matter the film’s ironic confusion of class “signals”, the social barriers turn out to be impassable. An ordinary man marries an heiress, as will happen time and again, first of all in It Happened One Night. But this time the match isn’t a winner, and everything goes back to how it was. The romance is not cranked up to be the engine for social dynamics that it would be for many comedies of the 1930s. Platinum Blonde is Capra’s first “big” film, but in some ways it belongs more to the times than to its maker: sumptuous foyers and heiresses in evening gowns would be recurring settings and figures of the genre for years to come, everywhere except in Capra’s comedies. The film should have been called Gallagher, the name of Loretta Young’s character, the colleague in love with the journalist Robert Williams, who is easily seduced by the blonde allure of money: Harlow’s explosive appearance in The Public Enemy was the reason for naming the film in her honor. But today, in another century, it’s Young who appears the most astonishing beauty, and her nude back the real erotic punctum of the film.

Paola Cristalli