Nothing Sacred (1937)

(On TV, June 2021) As much as it may displease some classic-movie fans, I often feel that colour films of the 1930s-40s have an advantage over their black-and-white equivalents. It’s not as if I dislike black-and-white movies or even make much of a fuss when I see one — I fact, I can talk up a storm about the crispness of great black-and-white cinematography, especially during the rather long period during which colour cinematography was typically blurrier and more artificial than time-tested monochrome. But seeing a film like Nothing Sacred emerge from the 1930s even in muted colours (and I say this having seen the terrible-quality public domain version) is a bit of a thrill. Never mind the story — my favourite scene is the one in which a small plane approaches late-1930s Manhattan in colour, with its sparse skyline and green fields in viewing distance of Manhattan. (For bonus points, we also have in that sequence a character bah-humbugging the sight of the Statue of Liberty while mentioning a character named Oliver Stone.)  There’s also the unusual sight of a screwball comedy in colour, and the only colour film to feature Carole Lombard. The film is also notable, I’m told, for pioneering special effects work, most notably in superposing shots and rear projection mixing location photography and studio characters. Still, there’s more than colour cinematography at play here. At 75 minutes, Nothing Sacred doesn’t have a lot of time to spend in elaborate plotting, but it does make the best of its running time for rapid-fire jokes and bon mots that don’t beg for laughs. The story is thin but still mordant in its depiction of media rapaciousness in service of viewership by proposing a journalist’s quest to promote the impending death-by-sickness of a young woman, even as the young woman herself knows she’s not sick and takes advantage of the opportunity to visit the big city. Change a few details, and it would be just as relevant in this age of clickbait “journalism” and Munchausen by Internet — the cynical attitude alone, far more than the cinematography, makes Nothing Sacred timeless.