Reviewed by Colin Jacobson (October 2, 2023)
Due to kidney failure and other health issues, Jean Harlow died at the young age of 26. This left 1937’s Saratoga as her final flick – one the studio needed to work around her loss to complete because she passed during the production.
Due to gambling debts, Frank Clayton (Jonathan Hale) causes his horse farm to go broke. Bookie Duke Bradley (Clark Gable) gains the deed to the ranch as payment, though he accepts reluctantly due to his friendship with the family.
Despite that, this doesn’t sit well with Frank’s daughter Carol (Harlow), and she attempts to find a way to regain control of the land from Duke. Initially antagonistic toward each other, might Duke and Carol see love blossom?
Uh, yeah. If this sounds like a spoiler, then you need to get out more.
Saratoga offered the sixth collaboration between Harlow and Gable. They didn’t connect romantically in all six, but by 1937, audiences clearly expected those leads to fall in love, so it comes as no surprise this film would follow that path.
The question becomes whether or not Saratoga manages to offer anything clever or intriguing with a story that hews toward viewer expectations. Unfortunately, this becomes a fairly stale stab at a romantic comedy.
In particular, the story just feels like a mess. We don’t get a particularly clear through-line, so while we fully realize where the narrative will conclude, Saratoga fails to find an involving path to arrive there.
Really, beyond the “enemies who become lovers” formula, Saratoga barely attempts a plot. Of course, Carol’s fiancé Hartley Madison (Walter Pidgeon) acts as a fly in the ointment, but no one ever takes him seriously as a romantic rival.
Pidgeon plays Madison as one of the blandest characters in movie history, and he obviously offers no competition for the dynamic Gable. Clark doesn’t stretch his legs as Duke, but even a cruise control Gable still manifests a charismatic figure.
Whether due to her frail physical status or just the dullness of the script, Harlow fails to create sparks with Gable, unfortunately. She comes across as a bit flat and lethargic, without the effervescence one would expect from a major star of the era, so I suspect her illness damaged her performance.
Inevitably, it becomes tough to avoid the temptation to look for the “fill-in footage” here. Saratoga used doubles to substitute for Harlow, and her absence becomes pretty obvious.
Well, when we hunt for these scenes, that is. Saratoga manages to cover for Harlow reasonably well, as some of the scenes without her feel obvious from the “looking for it” POV but don’t seem like a tremendous stretch otherwise.
Actually, given that the studio wanted to reshoot the movie with a different female lead, I expected to find much more Harlow-free than we do.
Instead, only a handful of scenes with doubles appear. Harlow made it through about 90 percent of the flick, so the sequences without her become only a minor distraction at worst.
Carol does go MIA for an awful lot of the third act, though, which makes me suspect the producers rewrote the script to work around Harlow. This means the prospective romantic finale feels odd and truncated since Harlow wasn’t there to shoot it.
Nonetheless, the bigger issue here remains the muddy narrative and the general ennui of the experience. As noted, the plot feels mushy and takes us down a fairly uninteresting path to the inevitable romantic finale.
Saratoga does boast a solid cast. In addition to those mentioned, we find talents like Lionel Barrymore, Hattie McDaniel, Frank Morgan, Una Merkel and Cliff Edwards.
Heck, since Margaret Hamilton shows up in an uncredited small role, we even get a preview of 1939’s Wizard of Oz!
All of this brings us to a genial movie that just doesn’t click. Even with a solid group of actors, Saratoga simply seems too inert and directionless to become more than a minor pleasure at best.
