Filmic Friday 314: When Ladies Meet

Sometimes We Watch Without Watching

I'll be honest, guys, I haven't been able to actually focus on a movie in a while, so forgive me if this review isn't up to my usual standards.

A Surprisingly Nuanced take on a movie about infidelity

When Ladies Meet is a film in which a novelist (Joan Crawford) falls in love with her married publisher. His wife does not know. The novelist's on-again-off-again boyfriend has come back to see her and finds out the hard way that she's been swept off her feet by a guy who he immediately pegs as a serial philanderer.

While, yes, the boyfriend (played by Robert Taylor) is a manipulative little jerk on occasion, he actually has everyone's best interests at heart - except for Rogers Woodruf the publisher (Herbert Marshall). Joan's Mary Howard is thoroughly enchanted by Woodruf to the point where she completely blinds herself to the fact that he's married and his wife likely loves him. His wife, Clare (Greer Garson) does not appear until about the halfway through, but when she arrives, it's clear that both she and Mary are being played by Rogers. Jimmy (Robert Taylor) is offended by all of this, behaving pretty terribly so that everyone can blame him in the end if he's wrong about Clare not knowing that Rogers is cheating on her with Mary. He's not wrong.

The final confrontation is facilitated on one of the coolest locations I've ever seen in a romantic drama - a converted mill where Spring Byington's Bridget Drake (Mary's best friend) lives. Bridget is a flake, but her taste in obliquely gay designers is apparently impeccable because that set is gorgeous, but interior and exterior, making for the perfect setting to act out the title.

Because it is in this laughably overwrought setting (with functioning waterwheels, fantasy swings, a severely out-of-place French butler, and bars made from the gears of the grist mill) that the eponymous Ladies (Clare and Mary) meet at last.

They are very much alike - strong women who have a very good idea of what they want out of life, trim, athletically built, and with "hands as graceful as thoroughbreds" (because of course a guy named Rogers would have a bizarre hand fetish) - and they would easily become best friends if it weren't for the fact that they've both gotten played by Rogers Woodruf.

This is very much a 1940s movie (though there was an earlier version of this same film in 1933 starring different people yet still directed (in part) by Robert Z Leonard. I... kinda want to see both to see how they handle everything differently. It could be used as a tool to see what individual actors brought to their roles, I'd imagine...

I don't usually, as a rule, enjoy these kinds of films, because they're usually pitifully melodramatic to hide the fact that there's no story and poor direction, but When Ladies Meet was pretty engaging! With excellent set design, powerhouse actors, and a fascinating look at women as active participants in a movie (with the men serving largely as catalysts, rather than as the main driving force), it's a pretty fresh movie from 1941.

I'd definitely recommend giving it a watch if you can find it somewhere!

That'll do it from me, today

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