|
Nothing Sacred is a 1937 movie starring Carole Lombard and Fredric March, and directed by William A. Wellman. It is considered a classic of the screwball comedy genre, and is filled with over-the-top satire of movie expectations and American culture.
The screnplay was written by Ben Hecht, based on a story by James H. Street. The movie was filmed in Technicolor by Selznick International.
March plays Wally Cook, a New York newspaper reporter who tries to pull a scam by passing off an ordinary African-American as an African nobleman hosting a charity event. The original cut had some gross ridicule added to the simple comeuppance that remains when the man's wife appears to ruin his scheme, but this was removed. Wally Cook is demoted to the epitaph department, from which he is sent to Vermont to interview Lombard's character Hazel Flagg, a woman supposedly dying of radium poisoning, though radium is not mentioned in the film, just that she works in a watch factory.
Instead of kindly, down-home rural people, he has to try to get information from a local played by Margaret Hamilton. The supporting cast also includes Walter Connolly, who plays Oliver Stone, Wally Cook's boss, and Charles Winninger, who plays Hazel Flagg's doctor.
The audience learns early on that Hazel Flagg is not really dying, and the movie is one comedy gag and ridiculous situation after another. What is most satirized is the pattern of emotions of the general public in the movie who are so moved by the story of her dying - and how quickly they will forget when it has to be published only a short time later that has recovered.
Ben Hecht's screenplay was also the basis of a 1950s Broadway musical called Hazel Flagg, as well as Living It Up, a 1954 movie starring Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.
|
