RKO Sets The Price For Love

Ann Harding Claims The Right To Romance (1933)

Ann Harding was most grounded of precode women, hers a line in reasoned calm. Being thirty, then past it, lent characters sobriety welcome to the genre. Censorship choked life out of sex topic that was focal to Harding, Kay Francis, Chatterton, others who knew life's score, but could no longer express it on truth terms. Harding as most subdued of the lot meant she'd be early forgot. That plus lack of a signature role (The Animal Kingdom the closest, but out of circulation till long after her 1981 death). Harding underplayed and so seems modern today. When she beds down, it's less illicit than application of common sense. Convey of intelligence put Harding to enact of professional women, on this occasion a plastic surgeon who "smells of ether" and knows to get a man means playing the "giddy female." Shore vacation puts her in crosshair of idler rich Robert Young, whom she marries in haste to despair of medico Nils Asther, him loving from afar. This may crash on formula shoals but for brief spend (67 minutes) that most any precode can sustain (backdrops and fashion to look at if nothing else).

Search for beauty angle is well observed, women hoping facelifts will pave path to romance. Harding's surgeon can evidently fix any mishap or mutilation --- were real-life docs as proficient in 1933? Certainly there were stars of the era who sought cosmetic cure for age, few of them getting result so satisfactory as Dr. Harding delivers here. I'm wondering just when face work became panacea it's considered today. Based on horrors we still see emerge from operation tables (check any week's Enquirer), true success at such effort may still be in offing. The Right To Romance was made during Merian C. Cooper watch, his notion to increase RKO volume as offset for losses, modern-set stories done cheap and by bundles. Industry joke was same bundles out of RKO being product of unwed motherhood in one after another sex mellers spat out by the company. Primary risk to contract stars like Harding or Constance Bennett was overexposure or sameness of vehicles. Their party had to end whatever disposition of the Code. Among six RKO titles owned by Merian C. Cooper and tied up for years, The Right To Romance was revived in 2006 by TCM (another with Ann Harding in that group: Double Harness).