Like Oil And Water- Barbara Stanwyck and
Clark Gable’s To Please A Lady- A Film Review (1950)
DVD Review
From The Pen Of Zack James
To Please a Lady, starring Barbara
Stanwyck, Clark Gable, and a bunch of famous and not so famous race car drivers,
1950
Okay, let’s go by the numbers here, or
rather the science and the heck with the numbers, oil and water do not mix. Do
not mix for very sound reasons having to do with chemical properties, densities
and all that other stuff you learned, or half learned like me, in high school chemistry
class. And that is what we have here is this classic black and white 1950 romance
film, To Please a Lady.
The oil-well of course hard-nosed, want-to-win-at-any-cost-he-man-1950s-he-man-war
hero race car driver Mike Brannan (played by a Clark Gable beginning to get a
little rough around the edges but still a worthy movie matinee idol). The water-of
course hard-nosed, want-to-get- the- story-at-any-cost syndicated columnist
Regina Forbes (played by Barbara Stanwyck last seen dangling a provocative ankle
Fred MacMurry’s way in Double Indemnity
so don’t mess with her, no way). No way is this combination going to be anything
but daggers and twenty paces especially when brash Mike gets Regina’s nose out
of joint during an interview in which he dismisses her out of hand. (And in
another scene as well in which he slaps her after some silly provocation, something
that would rightly cause a stir today with all the cases of domestic violence
around but which in the film just acted to make Mike more attractive to Regina.)
I hope you paid attention to one little
word in the first paragraph, that word “romance” because despite all my blathering
on about oil and water not mixing there is no way in a 1950s Hollywood film that
hunk Gable and fetching Stanwyck are not going to wind up under the satin
sheets (even if not shown on film like they would nowadays). So the pair has to
go through a dance before they finally join up. That dance included Regina
getting Mike barred from anything to do with race cars except some back road circus
thrill-a-minute gig. But Mike didn’t win his tough guy on the track reputation
(or that chest full of medals in some muddy European fields) by rolling over and
so he worked his way back up to the Indy cars. Of course he can’t win at Indy,
can’t win the real race because there is no Mike Brannan listed as winning that
trophy any year. But he does win Regina as she had begun to follow his road back
as he lifted himself from the cheap streets. They have their ups and downs like
every couple but in the end the audience gets to feel good that at least in the
movies oil and water do mix-I wish I knew the formula for it though.
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