Nothing Sacred (1937) is a Technicolor screwball comedy, fast paced and sharp, of how a small-town woman pretends to have a terminal illness and turns into a national heroine, and how the big-city reporter takes advantage of her, only to fall in love with her. Nothing Sacred is now a free public domain movie and classic movie, many restored HD versions of the film are available on the Internet and on disc.
Movie Background Table
Movie Cast Table
| Actor | Role |
|---|---|
| Carole Lombard | Hazel Flagg |
| Fredric March | Wally Cook |
| Charles Winninger | Dr. Enoch Downer |
| Walter Connolly | Oliver Stone (editor) |
| Sig Ruman | Dr. Emil Eggelhoffer |
| Frank Fay | Master of Ceremonies |
| Troy Brown | Ernest Walker (“African nobleman”) |
| Max “Slapsie” Rosenbloom | Max Levinsky |
| Margaret Hamilton | Warsaw, Vermont drugstore lady |
| Hattie McDaniel | Mrs. Walker |
| Olin Howland | Will Bull |
| Raymond Scott | Band leader |
| Hedda Hopper | Herself (gossip columnist) |
Full Plot Summary
Nothing Sacred 1937 film opens in New York City at the offices of the sensationalist Morning Star newspaper. Reporter Wally Cook has just pulled a notorious stunt: he passed off Ernest Walker, a Harlem shoeshine man, as an exotic “nobleman of the Orient” hosting a charity drive. When the hoax is exposed, the paper is humiliated.
The editor Oliver Stone who is angry with Wally has demoted him to work on the obituary desk. Wally searches through news reports to find his next human interest story which leads him to discover a report from Warsaw Vermont about a young woman named Hazel Flagg who is believed to be dying from radium poisoning after her employment at a watch factory.
Stone sends Wally to Vermont because he wants to give Wally one final chance. Wally enters the quiet town and discovers Hazel who is crying. Enoch Downer the doctor who treats her has just delivered the news to Hazel which he considers to be good news because his previous diagnosis about her condition turned out to be incorrect. Hazel feels crushed because she thought that her illness would provide her with a way to escape boring life in Warsaw.
Hazel dreams of leaving her small town behind to explore the world. Wally extends an invitation to take her to New York as the Morning Star’s guest because he still thinks she will die but she accepts his offer. She convinces Dr. Downer to remain silent about the misdiagnosis while she acts as if she will die at any moment.
The Morning Star starts its full operation in New York City. Hazel receives three honors because she becomes a representation of American bravery which exists beyond death. The public sends presents to her while educational institutions and charitable organizations conduct programs to celebrate her and the entire city develops affection for her. Hazel performs her character with both joyful and guilty emotions while she attends parties and activities which she previously thought would not occur.
As Hazel and Wally spend time together, their relationship shifts from exploiter and subject to genuine affection. Wally is charmed by Hazel’s wit, lack of pretension, and flashes of honesty that slip through her act. He proposes marriage even while believing she is doomed, which only deepens her internal conflict.
The lie becomes harder to sustain. City officials and the Morning Star’s management want to milk Hazel’s story even further and insist on confirming medical examinations. A panel of pompous specialists, including Dr. Emil Eggelhoffer, examine her. After comic tests and confusion, they declare that Hazel shows no signs of radium poisoning.
The truth—Hazel is perfectly healthy—bursts the bubble. The doctors confront Oliver Stone with the evidence, and soon the city’s leaders realise they have built a massive civic sob story on a fraud. But rather than admit their own gullibility and face public humiliation, Stone and the political powers decide on a new fiction: they will quietly let Hazel “go away to die” and pretend the story ended nobly.
Wally, stunned and angry at first, gradually recognises that Hazel never meant malice; she just wanted a way out of her suffocating life. Hazel, wracked with guilt, even considers staging a fake suicide to satisfy everyone’s expectations and “die” in the public imagination. In a chaotic, slapstick sequence, her and Wally’s attempt to arrange this backfires, leading to one of the film’s most famous scenes: a wild fistfight between Hazel and Wally in her hotel room, where she belts him like a boxer and he finally snaps out of his sentimental fog.
In the end, rather than continue feeding the city’s hunger for drama, Hazel and Wally choose escape. With the officials’ tacit cooperation, they slip away, get married, and sail for the tropics, leaving New York to believe its tragic heroine has gone off to die “like an elephant.” The movie ends with the couple alive, together, and out of reach of the paper’s headlines.
Genre and Key Themes
Nothing Sacred is an archetypal screwball comedy with saturated color, zippy whitiness, and physical jokes, yet behind the jokes, it is a caustic satire of the publicity, tabloid journalism and the American desire to have heroes-on-the-shelf.
Key themes include:
The hype in the media and the created heroes.
The movie mocks the newspapers which will run anything to be circulated including the hoax of the Oriental nobleman by Wally and the fabricated terminal illness by Hazel. It demonstrates that a city can transform a stranger into an icon in a simplified story very fast.
Fakery and celebrity culture.
Hazel is the victim and participant. She deceives that she is sick and the institutions surrounding her are happy to exaggerate the lie since it sells newspapers and strokes civic egos.
Small-town disillusionment and big cities corruption.
Warsaw, Vermont, is pedestrian and sincere; New York is gay and savage. The lie told by Hazel is made out of real frustration and the reaction of the city demonstrates even more sinister and long-standing lies.
Cynicism wrapped in romance
The script by Ben Hecht enables people to sincerely feel between Hazel and Wally, yet it never ceases to laugh at the systems in which they live. The love affair goes hand in hand with a very contemporary cynicism towards institutions and the mass sentiment.
Disease, terror and abuse.
The film exploits the fears of technology and health prevalent in the 1930s by using an alleged incidence of radium poisoning, and demonstrates how even tragedy can be commoditized.
Nothing Sacred (1937) Full Movie Watch and Download
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Movie Review
Nothing Sacred 1937 movie is generally considered as one of the greatest achievements of screwball comedy and one of the best performances of Carole Lombard. Her Hazel Flagg is hilarious, fragile, manipulative and exasperated at the same time, and one can find the comment of critics who accentuate the role of Wellman, putting Hazel Flagg into close and high contrast shots of Technicolor to put her face and star image center stage.
Fredric March balances her with a smooth and frustrating combination of flair and frustration in the character of Wally Cook, the reporter who is an opportunist beginning and reluctant romantic partner in crime. Their relationship spurs them to both verbal swordplay and the physical humour, and is the source of the notorious mutual punch-up, which even now seems remarkably wild in a 1930s studio movie.
The surrounding characters are piled on top of each other: Oliver Stone, the hot-tempered and alcoholic editor,wb Charles Winninger; Dr. Downer, the boozy specialist, Sig Ruman; Margaret Hamilton and Hattie McDaniel, all minor yet delicious roles.
On the screen, the early Technicolor photography by W. Howard Greene gives Nothing Sacred a very different appearance than most of the black-and-white screwball comedies. Another highlight in the film was that it was the first screwball comedy filmed in color and it was also one of the first films to employ Technicolor and process shots and montage and rear projection. This aspect is much better displayed in modern restorations, such as Kino Lorber on Blu-ray of a 2K scan of restored elements, as compared to the washed-out public domain prints which circulated decades.
Racial stereotypes and jokes revolving around Ernest Walker, the Harlem bootblack Wally employs to make his first hoax, are some of the elements that have not aged well. Modern critics have termed the film as racist and inclusive and noted that although the movie allocates screen time to Black actors such as Hattie McDaniel and Troy Brown, it continues to deal in caricature-grade degradation. Today viewers commonly compliment the witiness of the movie and admit such old-fashioned and awkward aspects.
Nevertheless, nothing sacred full movie is a quick, crisp, and surprisingly contemporary approach to media spin and overnight celebrity that is why it continues being shown, refurbished and analyzed even now. Being a free HD downloaded movie with several copies on file archives, it is among the most accessible classic screwball comedies to watch, and one of the most effective previews of the talent of Carole Lombard.
Movie Tags
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