Wael Katkhuda
This movie without doubt is one of the best Harlow performances in her whole career (next to Libeled Lady), she is so natural and her comedy skills are superb. In my opinion at our time her performance and act are more realistic than Greta Garbo and a lot of female stars of the 30s. One of my favorite scenes were Alice and Cinderella Argument with Tracy, Fanny Fish and of course the last tow scenes. All the characters played very well such as: Frank Morgan,Ted Healy and Louise Beavers. Now the only actor who annoyed me was Lee Tracy, he really gave me a headache every-time he opened his mouth, his acting skills were good but he had a terrible voice which annoyed me a lot and i had to finish the film in two days in order to keep my ears quite and clean! i wish if Spencer Tracy was instead him for this part, because he really gave us a great performance a few years later also as a news paper man in (Libeled Lady).Finally if you are a big fan of Miss Harlow i highly recommend this light comedy for you.
Antonius Block
It's nice to see Jean Harlow in a major role after her breakout performances in 1932, but this film is saddled with a weak script, and filled with noisy and annoying performances. Harlow plays a Hollywood starlet and is awfully shrill in the first half of the film, but the biggest problem is Lee Tracy, who plays a slick studio publicity agent. His actions in keeping Harlow in line, his voice, and his smugness all made me want to reach back in time 83 years and punch him in the face, and yet he is positioned as the 'good guy'. Ugh! The attempts at comedy are dated, but Tracy manipulating it so Harlow can't adopt a child because he believes she couldn't do that and have a career is just sickening, not clever.There are some in-jokes in the film, the best of which is 'Harlow playing Harlow' and the barrel scene from 'Red Dust'. It's nice to see Frank Morgan, better known as being the Wizard of Oz, and it's always nice to see Harlow, and here she tells off the leeches in her life in a nice scene, coos over a baby, and later rides a horse. However, it's pretty bad when your favorite part of the movie is the three sheepdogs! This one is overrated and disappointing.
richard-1787
The script of this movie is brilliant.The actors' delivery of it - especially the leads, Lee Tracy, Jean Harlow, and Pat O'Brian - is brilliant.The director's handling of the actors' delivery of the script is brilliant. (Director: Victor Fleming) In short, this movie is brilliant.When they talk about screwball comedy, this is what is meant. Clever - and very intelligent, even complex - dialog delivered at the speed of lightening with faultless diction that lets you hear every word, even when done with what were then very primitive microphones.This is one fun movie. Enjoy it.
lugonian
BOMBSHELL (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1933), directed by Victor Fleming, marked the turning point in Jean Harlow's movie career. For what many consider to be her finest comedic performance next to LIBELED LADY (1936), BOMBSHELL is her best movie. Sometimes labeled "Blonde Bombshell" to avoid any confusion to a war movie, BOMBSHELL, in some ways is a war movie, a battle between actress and her living and working surroundings of oddball characters, resulting to a Hollywood farce that makes no apologies poking fun of itself at its own expense.The opening gets off to a fine start as the sizzling bombshell explodes into the image of film star, Lola Burns, segued through a series of sequences through the underscoring of "Low Down Rhythm" revealing her personal activities through newspaper and magazine articles before shifting to title scoring from the motion picture HOLD YOUR MAN (1933) showing theater patrons watching the kissing scenes between Lola and co-star, Clark Gable. The montage concludes with fans reading about Lola in Photoplay Magazine before plot development gets underway. Lola Burns, Hollywood's brightest film star for Monarch Studios, lives in a Beverly Hills mansion where she supports her large sheepdogs, a drunken gambling father (Frank Morgan) acting as her business manager, and a lazy good-for-nothing brother, Junior (Ted Healy). Also under her wing are Loretta (Louise Beavers), a sassy maid; Winters (Leonard Carey), a butler who's in season filling in for Summers; and Miss Mac (Una Merkel), a personal secretary who, like the others, take advantage of her good nature. Arising at 6 a.m., Lola finds she must return to the set for retakes of her latest motion picture, "Red Dust," with Jim Brogan (Pat O'Brien), her old flame, directing her revised scenes. Tired of playing sexpots, Lola wants nothing more than to change her screen image. With her personal and professional life nothing but a series of complications, nobody is more responsible for her shattered life than her publicity agent, Space Hanlan (Lee Tracy). Things become more complex when Lola's fiancé, Marquis Hugo Di Binelli (Ivan Lebedeff), gets arrested at the Cocoanut Grove (featuring Gus Arnheim and his Orchestra) by detectives from the immigration department. The final drawback occurs when Lola loses all chances in adopting a baby boy when representatives (Ethel Griffies and Mary Carr) from the Fairfax Orphanage arrive at the wrong time to witness family squabbles between father and brother, a fist fight between Brogan and the returning Marquis, and intruding reporters. Embittered and disgusted, Lola walks out on family and studio contract for peace and tranquility in Palm Springs. While there she meets the wealthy Gifford Middleton (Franchot Tone), who not only becomes interested in Lola, but would "like to run barefoot through her hair." Before wedding plans are to take place, Gifford arranges a meeting between Lola and her future but snobbish in-laws (C. Aubrey Smith and Mary Forbes) visiting from Boston. When things start going wrong for Lola again, there's no doubt Space Hanlon is not far behind. A prime example to the definition "mad-cap" or "screwball," BOMBSHELL, is a forerunner to those loud and brash comedies in the director Howard Hawks (1938s BRINGING UP BABY and 1940s HIS GIRL Friday)tradition, never letting up for an instant. What Harlow may have lacked as a dramatic roles makes up for it in comedies such as this. Following the pattern of 1932 releases of WHAT PRICE Hollywood?, MERTON OF THE MOVIES and ONCE IN A LIFETIME, BOMBSHELL doesn't use the traditional rise to fame theme, for that Lola Burns, its central character, is already an accomplished movie star. All she really wants now aside from better film roles is a civilized home-life, husband and kids, but with her family, studio employees and one publicity agent who'll stop at nothing, it's totally impossible. Credited from a play by Caroline Franke and Mark Crane, BOMBSHELL very much appears to be an autobiographical account on the personal and professional life of Jean "Lola Burns" Harlow. Considering "Red Dust" an actual title to a Jean Harlow movie and Clark Gable her leading man (mentioned a couple of times in the story), Monarch Studios is, in fact, a fictitious name to MGM. Lola's classification as "The If Girl" is a clever in-joke on silent screen legend Clara "The It Girl" Bow.While Franchot Tone has the film's most famous line, Lee Tracy's "Why don't you change your brand of narcotics?" should go as an honorable mention. Tracy, whose catch phrase in song tone of, "Right, right" as part of his character trait, whose annoying performance in DOCTOR X (1932) is 100 percent perfect in BOMBSHELL. He gets his quota of laughs by stopping at nothing through his tricks of the trade of publicity gimmicks. Another added plus is the recurring gag of the unexpected appearance from a long lost husband (Irving Bacon) and his hilarious attempts in reclaiming the confused Lola, no matter where she goes.Others in "the Hollywood trenches" include Isabel Jewell as Junior's new girlfriend; and June Brewster as Alice Cole, actress victim of Space's schemes. Aside from Frank Morgan (sporting a walrus mustache) making his MGM debut but a start in his long range of befuddled characters he was to perform so well, especially as the title character as THE WIZARD OF OZ (MGM, 1939). Everything in BOMBSHELL works, thanks to the professional team effort between Harlow, Tracy and the rest of the cast.BOMBSHELL, distributed to home video in 1991 and a decade later on DVD, is one that can still be seen and appreciated whenever shown on Turner Classic Movies. (***1/2)
