The Shopworn Angel (1938)

(On Cable TV, September 2022) Some of the weirdest things about 1930s Hollywood are the surprisingly numerous films that, in talking about the American experience during World War I, ended up prefiguring what would happen during WW2—sometimes with the same actors that would go on to star in very similar wartime propaganda films. Many films seemingly custom-made for WW2 home-front morale boosting actually date from a few years before WW2 was even declared. Tearjerking romantic drama The Shopworn Angel is one of those, with Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart playing a mismatched couple whose romance is ill-fated from the start. Sullavan is the usual generic female protagonist (sub-variant: weary Broadway star), while Stewart reaches the end of his gangly young premier phase (and the beginning of his dominant screen persona) as a naïve aw-shucks soldier headed to war. She falls for him but in a complicated way that tells you that this isn’t meant to be a feel-good film: she’s got a serious, far more suitable (read: rich and older) boyfriend and her adventures with the soldier are just a sideshow to what she’s got going on with the other suitor—she marries the young man in the casual way typical of 1930s romantic films, but everything is thankfully resolved by the maudlin sad finale. There are some interesting comparisons to be made with the numerous previous versions of the same story—all of them predating the Hays Code, leading to some unwieldy creakiness in this one. The theme of soldiers going to war seems custom-fit to tell the young ladies in the audience to expect heartbreak when their boyfriends/husbands are shipped overseas—a reality that would hit only a few years later. This being said, The Shopworn Angel isn’t exactly a film to watch for fun. Sure, Sullavan and Stewart do what they do best here (without forgetting about Walter Pidgeon as the older, richer man) but the film itself is designed to be a downer, and seems artificially plotted to placate the Production Code censors in taking a story that demands more narrative freedom. The Shopworn Angel is an interesting piece of film history (and I’m skipping over its tumultuous production history), but saying that it’s a conventionally satisfying film by itself would be stretching it.