Love on the Run (1936)

(On Cable TV, July 2021) Neither Joan Crawford, Clark Gable or Franchot Tone step far away from their established screen personas in Love on the Run, a kind of silly romantic comedy that had its start in the 1930s but certainly didn’t end there. The premise will be dead familiar to anyone who’s ever seen a screen romance: a millionaire (Crawford) wants to get away from the attention she’s getting, while an undercover reporter (Gable) is only too willing to help her… as long as there is a good story in it. The tension created by the lies sustains much of the film, as is the rivalry between reporters Gable and Tone. To contemporary viewers, what makes Love on the Run more than a romantic comedy is the 1930s atmosphere: With hard-nosed print reporters in the lead, colourful characters such as aviator (how exciting!), communication by cablegrams, the allure of a glamorous European getaway, and the menace of international spies, it’s almost more interesting now than it must have been at the time. Still, there isn’t much to the foundations of the story — it’s clearly a derivative of It Happened One Night (back then a box-office and Oscar sensation) and it plays in the same comic space as many films of its era. It’s fun to watch but not overly gripping even if you like the actors involved in it. Still, Love on the Run is perhaps best not appreciated by itself, but as a representative example of a genre — the 1930s Hollywood comedy, light on the screwball and heavy on the romance between marquee names.