Customer Reviews

Reckless [VHS]

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I have to disagree with Mr. Maltin's review. The superb charm and talent of Mr. William Powell and Jean Harlow are definitely enough to pull you through the so called "phony and tired plotline". It' a pure joy to watch them, they'll make you laugh one minute, and tear your heart out at the next. This film was an unexpected delight. Once you manage to sit through the first and overly long opening musical number, sit back and enjoy. Yes, Jean plays Mona, a stage star, William is Ned, the man responsible for her career, and the man that is secretly in love with her. Enter the drink loving millionaire playboy Bob (Franchot Tone), who Mona falls fall, add one drunken night, and they're married. Of course Bob is already regretting his hasty marriage. However, they return to Bob's aristocratic home town, and the snobbish unacceptance of Bob's father and townsfolk, largely due to the fact that Bob had been engaged to a town favourite (A young Rossalind Russell), when he married Mona...Drama and tragedy ensue, forcing Mona to return to Broadway to support herself and Bob's child. However, a vicious campaign is launched against Mona by the judgemental aristocratic circle that believe the worst about her. All the while, Mona's friends, feisty grandmother and ever faithful Ned, rally around her to the very moving finale, when an almost broken, tearful Mona faces a callous, jeering audience with great style and dignity... I particularly enjoyed Ned's warm, funny, teasing relationship with Mona and especially, her grandmother, the definite highlight of the film. No one plays the charming, comedic tipsy-drunk better than William Powell! Now I can say his dramtic skills are just as good! Finally, I would like to add the corney comment that Ned was truely the wind beneath Mona's wings! Touching and funnily so, without being too sappy!

This picture seems especially designed to torture Jean Harlow, and to a lesser extent, her fans.

Her character Mona Leslie marries unstable alcoholic playboy Bob Harrsion (disturbingly well played by Franchot Tone - he's like "The Lost Weekend" without the happy ending), whose "sadness goes so deep I couldn't make him happy," and he shoots himself in the head while Mona and her friend/manager Ned (William Powell) are in the next room.

Whoever had the idea to put Harlow in such a role shortly after the suicide by gunshot of her husband Paul Bern must have been extraordinarily cruel, or stupid, or both (David O. Selznick, I'm looking in your direction). Mona is left alone to struggle for custody of, then to raise, her son by Harrison; in real life, all of Jean's pregnancies were teminated at her mother's insistence.

In another kind of irony, Ned is secretly in love with Mona and proposes to her at the end of the movie; in real life, Harlow and Powell were lovers and she was desparate to marry him, but he strung her along until her death, unwilling to commit.

The musical numbers of the film inadvertantly become another harsh treatment of Harlow, as it become painfully obvious that she can neither sing (it's dubbed, and it's not even close to Harlow's real voice) nor dance (despite attempts at trick photography, the double is easy to spot), and to Jean's credit, she seems to know it, seeming very stiff and uncomfortable during these parts of the film.

I guess my knowledge of Harlow's life (via David Stenn's biography) made this movie seem so depressing to me; perhaps someone who's a fan of Harlow's but doesn't know much about her personally would enjoy it more. I doubt it, though; its only saving grace is some of the amusing banter between Ned and Mona's Granny (May Robson).

A bizarre film which was obviously (and rather cruelly) modeled - at least in part - after a tragedy in Harlow's own personal life. For his first picture with Jean Harlow - with whom he was then involved romantically in real life - Bill Powell plays Ned Riley, an aristocrat who marries a "Broadway Baby" (Harlow, natch); tragic melodrama ensues. Harlow was angry at MGM for being forced to do this rather tasteless (for personal reasons) picture which obviously capitalised on the suicide of Paul Bern - Harlow's second husband - whose mysterious death became a notoriously hot scandal sheet subject for the press in 1932. Harlow tries hard to improve her acting in this, but the tension and inner strain is evident in several scenes (no wonder, considering the autobiographical nuances and overtones insinuated by the screen writers!) The Powell-Harlow chemistry ONSCREEN isn't much to mull over in this rather poorly constructed film with carelessly motivated characterisations. Catch LIBELED LADY - a delicious 1936 comedy with Spencer Tracy and Myrna Loy co-starring for a much more satisfying look at the duo at work!

...this movie rapidly descends into maudlin melodrama that is practically unwatchable. The movie starts out with promise with a feisty Granny Lesie (May Robson) pulling a rather hung over Ned Riley (William Powell) out of bed to bail playful star Mona Leslie (Jean Harlow) out of jail. These early scenes would make any fan of these three want to stick around for more, but believe me, you'll regret that decision. Things go downhill rapidly when Mona meets avid fan and drunken playboy Bob Harrison Jr. (Franchot Tone), whose enthusiasm wanes and drunkenness worsens after the two are hastily married. Every indignity you can think of is flung at Harlow's character at a time in Harlow's life when she herself had recently been through a great personal tragedy that mirrors what is going on in the film, and you just get the feeling that MGM is using that tragedy to sell movie tickets. It really is a sad spectacle for any Harlow fan.

The melodrama grows to ridiculous proportions by the end of the film, with Mona Leslie even being booed by fans and her giving a preposterous on stage speech as a result. All of this just crowds out any promise with which the film started. The fact that people are charging as much as they are for a poor VHS print of a worse picture is mind boggling. If you're a Harlow fan you probably already have her films that are out on DVD. Unfortunately, there haven't been any new ones put out on DVD about four years, including one of my personal favorites, Bombshell. Let's hope her one hundredth birthday in 2011 brings a boxed set of her own on pressed DVD, and that her films don't just get dumped into the Warner Archives.

There are certain films like RECKLESS that too closely mirror events of real life. Such films then resonate with subliminal emotions that crisscross with the intended flow of the director. Jean Harlow is Mona Leslie, a platinum blonde Broadway hoofer who disastrously marries Bob Harrison (Franchot Tone), a millionaire who weds her on a whim but quickly regrets doing so. His family, symbolized by the class-consciousness of Bob's father (Henry Stephenson) does all they can to undermine the newlyweds. Things then go from bad to worse until Bob kills himself in a fit of alcoholic depression. This suicide of Mona'a husband parallels the real life suicide of Jean Harlow's husband in the same manner. It must have been inhumanly painful for Harlow to recreate the sorrow that she had but recently gone through. Complicating matters was the choice of Harlow as the lead. Putting aside her personal issues, RECKLESS is one of her few dramatic failures. Director Victor Fleming originally shot the film as straight melodrama, but he later changed the flow of interest by adding a series of musical numbers which called for the lead to sing and dance. Harlow could play it straight or comedic with a deft hand, but she was neither a singer nor dancer. She lip syncs her way with a dance double handling the hoofing scenes. Nevertheless, even in such a confused film as this one, she could still emote. In the closing scene, where the audience hoots and boos her in an attempt to shoo her from the stage, Harlow abandons her singing and dancing routine to confront a packed house to justify her existence as a performer. This one scene almost saves the movie from being the disorganized mess that it very nearly was. William Powell tries hard as her unrequited lover to invest his role with some much needed gravitas. Unfortunately, he too must alternate between straight drama and comedy with the viewer not knowing and ultimately not caring how he plays it. Ultimately, when a film like RECKLESS goes this seriously astray one must look to the director for the finger of blame. Harlow and Powell simply were not give the chance to do what audiences knew they could.