When the New York Evening Star carelessly prints a false story about society dame Connie Allenbury (Myrna Loy) that results in a $5 million libel suit, editor Warren Haggerty (Spencer Tracy) decides to resolve the situation by hiring the sneakiest, smoothest operator he knows: ex-Evening Star reporter Bill Chandler (William Powell). The men don’t share a good history, but if anyone can come up with a scheme to fix this mess, it’s Chandler. Walking through the lobby of the Plaza Hotel, he is a dashing, elegantly mustached figure, his body language confident and relaxed despite receiving an overdue bill from the hotel management. When he meets Haggerty, he continually tries to brush him off, even saying “Warren” with an exaggeration that implies mocking reverence, all the while shooting off quick glances to make sure the newspaperman is taking his bait. Within no time, Haggerty agrees to Chandler’s expensive terms and they begin to conspire how to trap Connie in a real scandal.
Bill Chandler’s first scene in the screwball masterwork Libeled Lady (1936) is a perfect introduction to the man who portrayed him. Impeccably poised with a polished urbanity that belied his goofball sensibility, William Powell is one of classic Hollywood’s greatest and most tragically forgotten stars. Despite his peerless work as sleuth Nick Charles in the Thin Man films and his highly-publicized relationships with not one but two Golden Age icons — Carole Lombard and Jean Harlow — Powell isn’t often discussed alongside such luminaries as Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, Henry Fonda, and Cary Grant. However, like Grant, he had the heart of a clown, the suit of a gentleman, and the colossal talent of a legend.
A Powell character may look respectable, but they operate as if it were a disguise, a ruse to expose the ridiculousness of our institutions and the people who enforce them. His marionette-like physicality, vocal cooing, and cleverly executed facial twitches dissolve the image of the calm and collected man, unveiling the id we all wish we could indulge, one that insouciantly challenges authority and makes funny faces without vanity and bases decisions on desire rather than convention. To see Powell luxuriate in or surrender to silliness, again and again, is not only hilarious, it is cathartic.
There’s a modernity to Powell, too, that allows his performances to feel refreshing and spontaneous. In Libeled Lady, when Haggerty and Chandler are trying to convince Haggerty’s fiancée Gladys (Jean Harlow) to help them ensnare Connie, Chandler recognizes that to get anywhere with the feisty Gladys, he needs to be the ice to Haggerty’s fire. So, with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, he quietly sits on a desk with his legs crossed, radiating an air of indifference and forcing your eyes to go to him instead of powerhouses Tracy and Harlow. In a later bit, he breaks into an impromptu dance to annoy Haggerty that only lasts a few seconds but it conveys Powell’s oddball expressivity so gorgeously that it elevates the joke tenfold. In another scene, when Chandler and Gladys embrace each other to convince strangers they’re besotted newlyweds, Gladys spitefully bites his hand as soon as they’re alone, causing Chandler to let out a howl that only Powell’s distinctive voice could make.
Perhaps more than any other Hollywood actor, Powell wielded his voice like the divine instrument it was. As Roger Ebert so wisely noted, “William Powell is to dialogue as Fred Astaire is to dance.” Although he did fairly well during the silent era, the actor really hit his stride once the talkies emerged and sound revealed to audiences the mellifluous tones they had been missing. Banter had no better friend than Powell, who used dialogue as if it were a playground as he elongated words, testing their elasticity; clipped others to make them sharp and brittle; or imbued lines with a tremolo that heightened their comedic potential.
It also must be said that Powell was a low-key heartthrob. I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t sigh over those smoldering, hooded eyes and adorable dimples. Onscreen, romance with Powell is a blast. With the Thin Man series, he and Myrna Loy made marriage look like the coziest, sexiest, grandest adventure you could have, a depiction they would repeat in I Love You Again (1940) and Love Crazy (1941), while his seduction of Luise Rainer in The Emperor’s Candlesticks (1937), Esther Williams in The Hoodlum Saint (1946), and Kay Francis in films like Jewel Robbery (1932) and Ladies’ Man (1931) takes your breath away with its swaggering yet endearing charm. Offscreen, he stayed friends with his ex-wives, particularly Lombard, and was so devastated by Harlow’s sudden death that he had to be physically held up at her funeral.
Retired from acting by 1955 and disinterested in publicly discussing his films or private life, Powell faded from the limelight and lived quietly in Palm Springs with his wife of 44 years, Diana Lewis, until he passed away at age 91 in 1984. A purveyor of delicious lunacy, bold impertinence, and effortless cool, William Powell is a quintessential figure of the film comedy whose work and style are unlike any other actor’s. As Myrna Loy wrote in her autobiography Being and Becoming, “There’s nobody like him. There’s never going to be anybody quite like him.”
Libeled Lady will be screened at IU Cinema on October 15 as part of the series Saturday Matinee Classics: Foolish Fellas and Dizzying Dames.
Michaela Owens is thrilled to be the editor of Establishing Shot, in addition to being IU Cinema’s Communications and Outreach Media Specialist. An IU graduate with a BA in Communication and Culture and an MA in Cinema and Media Studies, she never stops thinking about classic Hollywood, thanks to her mother’s introduction to it, and she likes to believe she is an expert on Katharine Hepburn and Esther Williams.