Man of the World (1931)

Director:

Richard Wallace

Writers:

Herman J. Mankiewicz (screenplay)
Herman J. Mankiewicz (story)

Release Date:

28 March 1931 (USA)

Genre:

Drama | Romance

Plot:

A young American girl visits Paris accompanied by her fiancee and her wealthy uncle. There she meets and is romanced by a worldly novelist; what she doesn't know is that he is a blackmailer who is using her to get to her uncle. |

Plot Keywords:

Marly Horse | Paris France | Con Trick

Cast

William Powell	...	Michael Trevor
Carole Lombard	...	Mary Kendall
Wynne Gibson	...	Irene Hoffa
Lawrence Gray	...	Frank Reynolds
Guy Kibbee	...	Harry Taylor
George Chandler	...	Fred

Runtime:

74 min

Country:

USA

Language:

French | English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.20 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (Western Electric Noiseless Recording)

Company:

Paramount Pictures

Trivia:

One of over 700 Paramount Productions, filmed between 1929 and 1949, which were sold to MCA/Universal in 1958 for television distribution, and have been owned and controlled by Universal ever since.

Goofs:

Revealing mistakes: At the "Paris" horse race, they wanted to show the horses running clockwise (the opposite direction of US horse racing), so the flipped they negative causing all the numbers on the horses to be reversed in the film. They managed to edit the race to not show the number clearly, that is until the end of the race. The number 5 is very clearly backwards in the close-up of the finish.

So This Is Paris Hollywood

Paramount had a specialty of sex comedies set in Paris, France from the mid-twenties until the Production Code closed them down in 1935. At that point, the Screwball Comedy arose.

As long as they were doing comedies in Paris, they did a couple of straight programmers set there too. In this one, William Powell plays an American in Paris who, while trying to write, makes a living by an interesting blackmail scam -- I've never heard of it before.

This movie, with a script by Herman J. Mankiewicz and a good cast has a chance of being very good. But except for William Powell, as always, charming, and Guy Kibbee's emphatic muddleheadedness, director Richard Wallace seems to be unable to raise a decent performance. Carole Lombard keeps threatening to disappear into the background, Lawrence Grey seems impossibly callow, and Wynne Gibson seems to be reading her speeches phonetically off a blackboard.

One wants to like this movie and there are a few moments when it appears on the brink of turning into something very interesting, like the scene over onion soup at 1 AM, but then it turns into another pointless costume change.

William Powell's career was stuck at this point: he was trying to make the change from screen villain to leading man, but couldn't quite get the right vehicles. He would leave Paramount for Warner's until he struck gold at Metro in 1934. But he always remained a character actor, capable of small or broad performances that would delight the audiences. It's a pity he's not strong enough to carry this movie by himself.