In The Cradle Snatchers the blonde, shy, woman-fearing student claims that women bring bad luck so he stays away from them. They call him the Swede, and this melting-pot nickname resounds with an American destiny: wasn’t it a lying brunette siren that brought another poor Swede to disgrace in Hemingway/Siodmak’s The Killers? And wasn’t it a woman, the beloved and lost daughter, who caused the inconsolable grief of the Swede who looms over the history of literature, the main character of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral? Ramblings that can certainly worm their way into a film like this one, Hawks’s third, which is riddled with holes (about two reels are missing, the crux of the film some what elusive): and yet the fabric of the parts of the film we can see is light and feathery, with skilled, balanced editing. Beautifully decorated New York interiors (thanks to the young maestro William Cameron Menzies), three neglected forty-something wives, three skirt-chasing husbands, three students (one of them the Swede) ready to stage a comedy of errors, and three naughty flappers on the side. No melancholy, no misogyny, no ruined fate, even the Swede will reconsider his view of women, and everything ends in a carefree, democratic game of the sexes and of age (after all, a “cradle snatcher” is a person who has a considerably younger lover) that is rather theatrical and nevertheless a bit screwball. It could be that Hawks had DeMille’s thoughtful marriage comedies of the 1910s in mind, but here the moral lesson fizzes away in the ironic cheekiness of the jazz age: an acerbic little war of the sexes where we can glimpse the sparks of future masterpieces.

Paola Cristalli