Wife vs. Secretary (1936)

A comedy about trust, or lack thereof.

The wife Linda (Myrna Loy) trusts her husband Van Stanhope (Clark Gable), but too many little voices (mainly May Robson & Gloria Holden) begin to tell her she should not.

Not with a secretary who looks like that.

The husband trusts his secretary Helen "Whitey" Wilson (Jean Harlow) more than he trusts his wife, and so keeps a business-related secret from the wife, but not the secretary, which is caught by the wife, but misread.

The husband also knows of an opportunity for advancement for his secretary and, because of selfishness, keeps the secret from her, (why not simply be fair and propose a competitive offer?)

In the meantime, the secretary is caught in between all these trust issues and becomes the innocent victim of circumstance and malice.

She is a driven, ambitious person whose personal life is suffering because she is absorbed with her highly demanding work, her fiancé (James Stewart) being none too happy about it.

This being an early post-Code production it’s still allowed to be adult and sophisticated, and as such it perfectly identifies the problems and who is responsible for it.

The only allowance for the Code is that the secretary, despite one moment of temptation (“We are both too drunk…”) she remains faultless, which might work in favor of the whole point. (Actually, no. I can easily conceive that there is a resulting affair, and the film therefore becoming even more mature.)

Harlow’s reputation, despite being a legendary sexpot, has always seemed to me to be the result of studio hype, and maybe the fashion of the time.

She’s too much like a blonde Betty Boop lookalike. It’s difficult to see someone looking like her in contemporary times achieving the same sort of reputation; at least without becoming a sort of human cartoon.

Despite that, I think she truly shines here, she’s unconventionally cast for a secretary part, and her looks would realistically cause trouble for someone like her in that position.

Slick, smart (the one failing is that, all too conveniently, the husband doesn’t call his wife immediately after closing the business deal,) and funny, despite criticism about the film’s attitudes towards executives (the film does, after all, rightly point out lack of trust and selfishness of the characters.)