If there is a prototypical Mitchell Leisen film – meaning a melodrama with comedy woven through it, sometimes the reverse – Hands Across the Table is the first full embodiment of that art. It also contains the essential ingredients: archetypal characters such as the timid male or the man whose self-confidence is on unsteady ground, paired with women who possess a pleasing sharpness and a gently insistent nature. His women’s clarity of thought makes the men appear childish by comparison; male ego or machismo is trimmed by feminine pragmatism. In Hands Across the Table, an unusually vulnerable and astonishingly beautiful Carole Lombard plays a manicurist torn between a wheelchair-bound, kindly Ralph Bellamy (the eternal loser of romantic comedies) and a flighty, self-centred millionaire playboy played by Fred MacMurray, whose wealth has been completely wiped out by the Great Depression. Lombard and MacMurray enter a race to marry the first available rich partner – one for happiness, the other for comfort. Leisen does not cop out by offering an easy answer to the question of love or money, as the contradictory, poverty- romanticising Frank Capra might have. It is not that one man represents love and the other money; rather, both are handicapped by their inherent weaknesses, physical and psychological. For Leisen, life is a matter of choosing which frailties one is willing to live with. There are moments of magic, such as the morning after a night of flirtation and playful sexual tension, when Mac- Murray, lying beside Lombard, sings The Morning After, mischievously implying that their passion was consummated, only for the film to later reveal that desire has been held in check through humour and patience. (The suggestive use of songs, as well as their deployment to evoke memory, is a recurring device in Leisen’s cinema. In his films, songs both pacify and stir.) This was MacMurray’s first notable role; he had never taken movies seriously until working with Leisen and Lombard, the latter in particular offering him advice on spontaneity, timing, and the intricacies of business dealings with the studio.

Ehsan Khoshbakht