Lady Is Willing, The (Region B) (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Mar 11, 2025
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
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Director
Mitchell LeisenRelease Date(s)
1942 (September 23, 2024)Studio(s)
Columbia Pictures (Indicator/Powerhouse Films)- Film/Program Grade: B-
- Video Grade: A-
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: B
Review
[Editor’s Note: This is a Region B-locked British Blu-ray import.]
A screwball comedy starring Marlene Dietrich and Fred MacMurray, The Lady Is Willing (1942) has the right ingredients yet almost everything in the picture is just a little off. Hardly the go-to star for that genre, Marlene Dietrich plays a self-absorbed, flighty Broadway star—a part better suited to Claudette Colbert, Carole Lombard, or maybe Katharine Hepburn—but even many of the supporting parts feel miscast. The role of her flustered, overwhelmed business manager, for instance, would seem ideal for a character actor like William Demarest, but that role is filled by Stanley Ridges, who in the ‘40s specialized playing police detectives, doctors, and occasionally corrupt businessmen and politicians. Busy Charles Lane, on the other hand, often cast as reporters or cranky middle-management types, here is asked to play a shady lawyer trying to commit fraud. Even MacMurray, who usually excelled in such films, seems rather lost.
Dietrich is famous stage actress Liza Madden, smitten with an abandoned baby she’s found, deciding at once that she wants to adopt the infant. She’s so scatterbrained she names it Joanna and buys it toys and clothing before respected pediatrician Corey T. McBain (MacMurray) informs her it’s a boy. Later she names the child Corey not remembering the name of the doctor in her apartment hours before. Pointlessly, pediatrician Corey tells Liza he dislikes children, infants especially, a revelation that hardly endears him to the movie audience, and completely pointless since this dislike never enters into the plot.
The unmarried Liza realizes the only way she’ll be able to keep Corey is to marry somebody, and for this marriage of convenience selects the elder Corey in a tit-for-tat arrangement whereby he’ll be able to fulfill a lifelong dream, devoting his time to medical research on rabbits, in a makeshift laboratory set up in an adjacent apartment next-door, separated by the new nursery. Of course, these very different people fall in love.
It’s interesting watching Dietrich tackle such a part; it’s quite unlike anything she did before or after, speaking screwball dialogue machine-gun style, demonstrative and doting toward Corey, Jr., and expressing emotional vulnerability and even panic toward the end when there’s a health emergency with the baby. But the screenplay by James Edward Grant (best known for his John Wayne scripts) and Albert McCleery (who soon gave up writing to become an innovative television producer) doesn’t know what to make of Liza. We first see her already holding the infant, determined to keep him, so there’s no backstory to the character. The audience only knows in these early scenes is that she’s a high-maintenance, financially irresponsible, and self-absorbed woman and that the baby might be just a passing fancy, like one of her many mink coats. Dietrich sells the idea that she really adores the child, and the baby playing Corey Jr. is very photogenic and interacts well with Dietrich, but it’s hard for the movie audience to feel much sympathy toward her. She blithely resumes her stage career, leaving Corey’s care in the hands of her business manager and secretary (Aline MacMahon, quite good). When Corey develops a life-threatening illness requiring emergency surgery with no clear outcome, everyone bizarrely insists Liza appear onstage during the touch-and-go operation, hardly believable.
In other ways The Lady Is Willing is simply clumsy and obvious. Corey’s ex-wife Frances (Arline Judge) exists solely to be discovered reclining on Corey’s bed, Liza assuming the worst of her husband and setting up a painfully artificial separation. The melodramatics about the baby’s potentially fatal illness seem out-of-place in a movie like this, contrived and shamelessly manipulative.
More dated than Liza’s black maid—Marietta Canty, in a good performance—is the script’s embarrassingly, archly bifurcated concepts of gender roles. When Liza wrongly assumes little Corey is a girl, she goes all-out with pink clothes, dolls, and other “girl” toys, but when Corey Sr. informs her that his namesake is a boy, out all that stuff goes and the apartment is soon overflowing with toy firetrucks, toy hammers and the like, Liza even snatching a doll away from the impressionable tot, lest he get the “wrong” idea about such things.
That Liza is a big stage star plays no role in the story, really; it’s just an excuse to provide Dietrich with a musical number, itself awkwardly done. In these stage scenes and elsewhere, adding to the film’s constant off-kilter feel, Dietrich apparently broke her ankle and had to wear a cast, so for large parts of the movie she wears full-length costumes and photographed from odd angles that obscure her injury.
Powerhouse Films’ Region “B” Blu-ray of The Lady Is Willing is presented in its original black-and-white, 1.37:1 standard format. The video transfer is good, though there are signs of modest digital fixes, particularly around 1:10-mark, seemingly where the negative was damaged and to cover some missing frames. Optional English subtitles are provided. This is a Limited Edition of 3,000 copies.
The extra features consist of an audio commentary by Adrian Martin; a good, 27-minute video essay on the film by author Richard Dyer; a 52-minute Lux Radio Theatre adaptation of the film, starring Dietrich and George Brent; and an image gallery. The Digital Bits was provided only with a check disc, and thus did not receive a copy of the 36-page booklet included with the final release, featuring new essays and archival interviews.
The Lady Is Willing is certainly a curiosity worth seeing once, but it’s not one of the great screwball comedies, try as it might.
- Stuart Galbraith IV