Platinum Blonde (1931)

Jean Harlow may have been under contract to MGM, but it was at lowly Columbia Pictures that she played the title role in the aptly titled Platinum Blonde. Director Frank Capra always claimed that he and screenwriter Robert Riskin "stole" the plot from The Front Page, but beyond their mutual "newspaper" backgrounds there is no real resemblance between the two films. Robert Williams, a comic actor who died in 1932, plays a wisecracking, easily distracted reporter who manages to insult wealthy socialite Harlow (playing an uncharacteristically unsympathetic character). As retaliation, the girl inveigles Williams into marrying her, which not only shocks his news-hound buddies but sends his erstwhile sweetheart, sob sister Loretta Young, into an emotional tailspin -- though she won't let him know that. Williams tries to remain his old down-to-earth self, but soon his head has been turned 180 degrees by Harlow and her society chums, whereupon he gives up journalism to become an artsy-fartsy playwright. Finally brought to his senses, Williams gives Harlow the ozone and returns to his old job -- and to Young, who has never stopped loving the big lug. Many of the elements prevalent in Platinum Blonde were echoed in Capra's later films, notably the hero's preoccupation with such trivial pursuit as a pocket-sized puzzle and his tendency to settle arguments with stuffed shirts by punching them out.