Carole Lombard makes me curious, Fredric Marc makes me excited, Music by Oscar Levant seals the deal and Written by Ben Hecht makes me giddy: “Nothing Sacred” is one of those movies that builds up almost impossible expectations during the credits.
It’s a newspaper picture, a genre that Ben Hecht basically inveted with “The Front Page”. The cynical (of course) Wally Cook discovers the story of a woman dying of radium poisoning. He takes her to New York, not knowing that in fact she’s not dying at all, that it was all a misunderstanding. The whole city meanwhile is enamoured with this heartbreaking story and is keen on providing Hazel with the best time of her life, before she dies. So everybody just decides to go ahead with the lie.
Many people worked on the script, as was custom in those days, including Budd Schulberg, Dorothy Parker and Ring Lardner. It doesn’t show, or maybe it does in a good way. There’s also Max Rosenbloom, the boxer, in a supporting role. All the good stuff.
I guess some people think that maybe “The Wizard of Oz” was the first Hollywood picture in Technicolor, just because of the impressive switch to eye-poppin’ candy colours after the Kansas scenes, but that’s not true. “Nothing Sacred” is in Technicolor too, though I guess it just looks like it was colourized in the 80s.
Maybe the credits make me even happier than the movie itself. But, you know, you take what you can get.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmFVYqBFaNY