Popular reviews

• 

  Review by cowboy like eely ★★★

  carole lombard soaking wet in a fireman’s hat in 
  🌈TECHNICOLOR🌈

• 

  Review by Travis Lytle ★★★

  A technicolor curiosity from 1937, "Nothing Sacred" is comedy that satirizes media and fame while serving up charismatic performances from Carole Lombard and Fredric March. The film is short and might have contemporary audiences cringing at its near-but-not-quite sexism, but it is a worthy watch for its stars' chemistry, interesting execution, and fresh-feeling themes.

  Revolving around a newspaper man and his unintended relationship with a woman at the heart of a story, "Nothing Sacred" combines romance and satire for some high energy hijinks. Fredric March's reporter, looking to break free of the obituary desk where he toils, takes on the job of profiling a young woman claiming to have radium poisoning. It is all a hoax, but, by the time…

• 

  Review by Peter Labuza ★★★ 1

  A weird meshing of great talents that just seem somewhat unsuited for each other: the talky cynicism of screenwriter Ben Hecht and the rough and tumble casualness of director William Wellman. Fredric March's plays too much of a stern type here to make the laughs stick, and a lot of his lines just kind of drop there; Lombard fairs much better, especially the chemistry with Charles Winninger. She feels looser and more manic than March's single track performance. Hecht's best films (the Hawks comedies, though it's also in his Hitchcock thrillers) are built on the fact that every line/action is hit on a very specific beat, a sort of rhythm that demands a not necessarily limited visual/performative delivery, but one…

• 

  Review by Owen ★★★★½ 3

  I came across a David Thompson review of this earlier today that both stressed its short run time and was so totally at odds with my own lukewarm take on the movie that I felt I might as well spare an hour or so and see if I'd misjudged it. Before I put it on I had a quick glance on here and saw one unimpressed review after another, all of which seemed to have come to the same conclusions about it's flatness that I did when I first saw it and felt cheated of the classic screwball comedy I'd been promised.

  I'm really not sure what had changed with this viewing but it just clicked . The sheer Hechtiness…

• 

  Review by Bryce Receveur ★★★½ 1

  I wish I loved someone so much that I would beat them up so I could be with them.

• 

  Review by Christopher Moore ★★★★ 11

  I was so on board with the premise. Fredric March plays a journalist who's trying to resurrect his career after taking part in his newspaper's fraudulent scheme involving a fake African prince. He convinces his boss that a young woman dying of radium poisoning would make for a killer story. When he goes up to her small town in Vermont, he implores her to come to New York so she can escape the drudgery of her existence before she dies, where she ends up becoming a morbid celebrity sensation. Only catch though is it turns out she never had radium poisoning to begin with. Oops.

  Of course, the woman in question is played by Carole Lombard, who I adored in…

• 

  Review by Lebowskidoo🍿😷🍁 ★★★★½

  "Sit tight and tuck in your ears!"

  They weren't kidding when they said Nothing Sacred was a wild screwball extravaganza of a movie. Carole Lombard and Fredric March banter and bellow at each other until they fall in love. Classic rom-com scenario.

  Not a moment of screen time is spared, every moment counts when your movie is only an hour and seventeen minutes long. The plot kicks off and you'd better be holding on or you might lose your hat.

  I had to double check if this had been colorized or not, but no, it was, in fact, filmed in Technicolor. This makes it very unique for its period. Also, right at the beginning the movie features little 3D caricature…

• 

  Review by David Conner ★★★

  This is one of those films that I knew I’d seen before — probably decades ago — but I couldn’t really recall anything specific about it. Now, twenty or thirty minutes after having seen it again, it’s already starting to evaporate from my memory like breath on a cold window pane. 

  Lombard is appealing, as always, but I find that her charms have a certain abstractness, likely because it’s difficult to register the emotional warmth in her performances without getting distracted by her Platonically ideal bone structure. And Frederic March is serviceable, but he also seems a bit weighted down for a screwball romantic lead, possibly because he’d just come off of filming his Oscar-winning turn as the tortured alcoholic,…

• 

  Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★★★

  77/100

  [originally written on my blog]

  Lacks the passionate wallop of the truly great screwballs, which have an undercurrent of genuine pain beneath the fast-talking breeziness. It does however bring the funny and the biting, playing for comedy more or less the same idea that Billy Wilder would make grotesque a decade and a half later in Ace in the Hole. Hecht's witty script speaks for itself, but Wellman, pace his reputation as something of a journeyman hack, contributes a beguiling (if somewhat mystifying) formal playfulness, repeatedly placing obstacles between his actors and the camera. Are we being chided for voyeurism, in keeping with the film's patent disgust at the public craning its collective neck to see Hazel bravely dying?…

• 

  Review by Bre ★★★★

  I forgot how ridiculously good some of the shots in this movie are.

• 

  Review by Bre ★★★★½ 4

  There is something about this that really just caught me by my heart and soul and I loved it. Maybe it is the early technicolor, which always has such a magical quality for me, especially with such gorgeous cinematography. Or maybe it is the incredible dynamic between Fredric March and Carole Lombard that makes this whole thing so delightful. That fight scene is spectacular. Carole Lombard is ethereal. I never really cared for her before, but this film completely changed that. She is effortless in everything she does. This film is not necessarily laugh out loud funny. It is dark, it is subtle, and it is not traditional screwball. Yet I loved everything about it. Sometimes a movie just hits you when you aren't expecting it and you can't even really pinpoint why.

• 

  Review by Sara ★★★½

  contemporary comedians have nothing on carole lombard