Broadway and Hollywood, comedy and woman’s film. In any event, a film with encounters that were destined to last. The most explosive took place in Harry Cohn’s office, where Capra showed up with the script of Ladies of the Evening adapted from Milton Gropper’s play, which had been directed by David Belasco on stage and had enjoyed large success in New York. Next scene, brainstorming with Columbia’s screenwriting staff: Cohn likes the script, so everyone likes it, except for a recently signed on New York journalist who rips Capra’s adaptation apart bit by bit, while Capra listens dumbfounded and furious. But King Cohn realizes that the kid’s got the right stuff and forces the two to work together. The kid was Jo Swerling, who would become a brilliant practitioner of Hollywood screenwriting (Man’s Castle, The Whole Town’s Talking, a quick passage through Gone with the Wind, then, among the others, Blood and Sand
and Leave Her to Heaven). He worked on six films with Capra between 1930 and 1932, and several years later put some finishing touches on It’s a Wonderful Life. Swerling rewrote Ladies of the Evening and made it Ladies of Leisure, provocative and bitter title: women to be enjoyed and used, ‘party girls’ who offer their nude backs to painters’ brushstrokes while dancing and boozing with New York’s money and art élites. The Depression had not hit Hollywood yet, nor those bohémiennes top floor penthouses.
“I’m a party girl, you know what I mean”: that is Kay Arnold’s own definition of herself, the quick-witted and free-spirited heroine, still unaware that the destiny Gropper/Swerling/Capra are shaping for her is that of a cliché ‘lady of the camellias’, fallen-woman-devoted-to-sacrifice. Kay is played by Barbara Stanwyck, the other magic encounter that took place on the set: “a sensitive woman, very intelligent and extremely physically attractive,” wrote Pietro Bianchi twenty years later. And Capra probably thought the same, considering that Ladies of Leisure led to a tormented private romance and an intense union between the director and actress. The jazzy mode of the first scenes soon fades away, and the most unabashed sentimentalism takes over in the finale, which Stanwyck rescues with the “remarkable modernism” (Pauline Kael) of her performance; the heart of the film is in the studio of Ralph Graves, the son of a very wealthy family and the artist in love with Kay, finding in Stanwyck his model and muse. As one of the earlier attempts with sound, Ladies of Leisure fearlessly deals with the challenges of quick dialogue, but, as is often the case with films at that time, the most beautiful sequences are the silent ones: the rain beating on the large windows, a glimpse of Stanwyck as she undresses and puts on Ralph’s pajamas, details of door handles and cautious steps in an atmosphere of tender and conflicting desire. Joseph Walker was the film’s cinematographer, already a master of the rain, the stars and the lighting: and that was a time when Capra claimed that for the final success of a film, no one counts as much as a good cinematographer.

Paola Cristalli