Saturdays with the Stars: Carole Lombard

Each month of 2021 we will be taking a look at the leading ladies of some of Alfred Hitchcock's many celebrated classics; we'll be doing this series chronologically to when they first entered Hitchcock's filmography.  Last month we featured Maureen O'Hara, an actress who made one film with Hitch at the beginning of her career, but would be better known for her work in the decades to come with different directors.  This month, we're also going to feature an actress who made one film with Hitchcock, but whose career is rarely linked in conjunction with the great director the way that so many performers are.  However, this actress didn't make a film with Hitch early in her life, but at the tail end of her career before unspeakable tragedy cut her stardom short.  This month, our star is Carole Lombard.

Lombard grew up in comfortable surroundings, albeit from an early age without her father in her life (her mother moved she and her two brothers to Los Angeles when Carole was very young).  Carole got into show business by accident, after being seen playing baseball when she was 12, featured in a small role in the now lost film A Perfect Crime.  After the film, she signed a contract with Fox as a teenager, but this went nowhere until she started being featured as one of the beauties in Mack Sennett's comedy films, which led to her eventually getting wooed over to Paramount, where she enjoyed true success and entered into a well-publicized (but short-lived) marriage to William Powell.  In 1934, she starred in Twentieth Century opposite John Barrymore which showed Hollywood that she was brilliant in romantic/screwball comedies, and though the film wasn't successful financially, Lombard soon was cranking out hits in a similar format, becoming one of the decade's biggest stars (and due to her later marriage to Clark Gable, one of its more gargantuan celebrities).

Lombard's career has a lot of chapters for someone who died at the age of 33, most of which are really pleasant until the last one.  One of the stranger chapters, though, is how she ended up with Hitchcock, and it's perhaps weirder for Hitch because the film (a screwball comedy) was much, much more in Lombard's wheelhouse than Hitchcock's.  The movie, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, stands apart as the only true comedy that Hitchcock ever made in the United States, and I am really itching to see it as part of this month's filmography, as it was a big hit in its day, but is a movie that Hitchcock didn't like (though it appears he & Lombard got along quite well).  It's particularly fascinating because, as you can see from this photo, in still pictures Carole Lombard looked exactly like we'd expect from the many Hitchcock ladies that would come about in the 1950's & 60's (the icy, blue-eyed blonde) even if that doesn't match her onscreen persona at all.  We'll talk about their collaboration, as well as several other pictures in the extraordinary life of one of the only comediennes that got to be a Hitchcock lead all throughout May.