"After Office Hours" is a movie that, for its time in 1935, is insane. It starts off with Constance Bennett's character being dropped off by her chauffeur driven limousine in front of her new workplace, a newspaper, in the afternoon. Soon thereafter, the paper's editor, played by Clark Gable wearing a beanie type cap, is listening to Stuart Erwin's character explain that he only had a two day drunk in Brooklyn, not three days. Then Gable the editor reads a concert review Bennett the writer just turned in. He blasts it as mean-spirited, then fires Bennett and tells her to pick up her pay, including an extra two weeks' sudden termination pay. From there, the movie becomes even more unreal. Another posting here about the movie state that MGM made this movie in response to the tremendous success of "It Happened One Night." That sounds right. Even so, only MGM production chief Louis B. Mayer could a approve a movie like this, one that exists in a parallel universe where the lead characters go to parties in tuxedos, where one character drives his speed boat into a parking space in the living room of his country house and where Constance Bennett wears strange neck pieces made of dead animals. "Screwball comedy" is one phrase that describes what this movie wants to be. Only like most screwball comedies, including "It Happened One Night," "After Office Hours" is not funny and it plays more like propaganda for the masses. I have read that the work of this movie's director, Robert Z. Leonard, is now undergoing reappraisal, that he may be a better director than he gets credit for. In "After Office Hours," Leonard does a fine job directing furniture but that is all. Constance Bennett was a beauty who usually lit up the screen. Not in this movie, though, with her strange attire worn in flat lighting.
I can only imaging what film goers thought seeing this Gable and Bennett star vehicle crash and burn in 1935. This movie escaped to Loew's theaters on February 22, 1935. It may have been playing at second run theaters on April 14, 1935, Black Sunday, when the worst of the Dust Bowl storms unleashed black rollers from the Midwest east across the country.
In 1935, 85,000 people left the Midwest and their homes and buried farms to trek to California to escape the black blizzards. More immigrants to California than during the 1849 Gold Rush. I wonder what it must have been like to be in a movie theater in Kansas in 1935, watching this movie as the sky outside turned pitch black from rollers transporting the topsoil from the moviegoers' farms east to the Atlantic Ocean.
MGM knew how to make realistic movies, just look at the exceedingly grim 1932 movie "Night Court." Thanks to the 1934 Production Code, Hollywood stopped producing movies that were taken from the headlines. Production Code Administrator Joe Breen, the Hitler of Hollywood, censored all scripts to remove negative subjects like drug addiction, corruption, extramarital affairs and hard times for poor Americans, black or white.
Seeing "After Office Hours" on Turner Classic Movies in 2014, I can only wonder what the audiences said after paying their hard earned money to see this crackpot movie in the Depression year of 1935. I can only say this movie gets a 4 from me and I saw it for not much, TCM is included in my FiOS triple play.
I can only imaging what film goers thought seeing this Gable and Bennett star vehicle crash and burn in 1935. This movie escaped to Loew's theaters on February 22, 1935. It may have been playing at second run theaters on April 14, 1935, Black Sunday, when the worst of the Dust Bowl storms unleashed black rollers from the Midwest east across the country.
In 1935, 85,000 people left the Midwest and their homes and buried farms to trek to California to escape the black blizzards. More immigrants to California than during the 1849 Gold Rush. I wonder what it must have been like to be in a movie theater in Kansas in 1935, watching this movie as the sky outside turned pitch black from rollers transporting the topsoil from the moviegoers' farms east to the Atlantic Ocean.
MGM knew how to make realistic movies, just look at the exceedingly grim 1932 movie "Night Court." Thanks to the 1934 Production Code, Hollywood stopped producing movies that were taken from the headlines. Production Code Administrator Joe Breen, the Hitler of Hollywood, censored all scripts to remove negative subjects like drug addiction, corruption, extramarital affairs and hard times for poor Americans, black or white.
Seeing "After Office Hours" on Turner Classic Movies in 2014, I can only wonder what the audiences said after paying their hard earned money to see this crackpot movie in the Depression year of 1935. I can only say this movie gets a 4 from me and I saw it for not much, TCM is included in my FiOS triple play.