The Cowboy and the Lady (1938)

(On Cable TV, March 2022) Look, I’m not going to apologize for my near-complete lack of enthusiasm for Gary Cooper. He’s not a bad actor and clearly not a bad movie star, but his appeal is so incredibly bland that he seems to form a void of charisma every time he shows up on screen. I get that he’s going for a very safe and stoic ideal of the American male and that movie producers loved that stuff, but he seems so boring compared to many of his contemporaries. My point being that I do the equivalent of a mental shrug every time he pops up in a film, and that can be a problem when much of the film depends on his appeal. In The Cowboy and the Lady, for instance, his Cowboy doesn’t hold a candle for the charm of Merle Oberon as an aristocratic lady who, in trying to escape his influential father, meets and marries him. The relationship being built on a big lie—as in: she pretends to be a maid—the third act brings along all of the complications that you can imagine. The Cowboy and the Lady works as a film, but only just—it has a straightforward quality that keeps it from running aground, but on the other hand, there are dozens of films from the same era that tackle similar material more successfully. It may be my lack of enthusiasm for Cooper, but then again maybe it’s just the film being ordinary.