BOMBSHELL (Fleming, 1933)

“She’s Sizzling! She’s Explosive! Beautiful Jean is All TNT in This Mad, Merry Mirthquake!”

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer / Dir. Victor Fleming
95 mins.

Production: August 7, `1933 — September 1933
Release date: October 13, 1933
Release status: Available to watch on DVD.

Cast: Jean Harlow (Lola Burns), Lee Tracy (Space Hanlon), Frank Morgan (Pops Burns), Franchot Tone (Gifford Middleton), Pat O’Brien (Jim Brogan), Una Merkel (Mac), Ted Healy (Junior Burns), Ivan Lebedeff (Marquis), Isabel Jewell (Junior’s girlfriend), Louise Beavers (Loretta), Mary Forbes (Mrs. Middleton), C. Aubrey Smith (Mr. Middleton)

Summary: A squirrelly, madcap movie star, Lola Burns, (Jean Harlow), fed-up with a family of leeches living out of her Hollywood mansion, decides she’s had enough of them–and her publicist (Lee Tracy)–after they thwart her dreams of motherhood with a drunken brawl on her property. Lola heads to Arizona, where the son of Boston socialites (Franchot Tone) seems to bring some order back into her life.

Trivia:

The film is considered by most to be a thinly veiled parody on the life and dizzy times of actress Clara Bow, who just so happened to be director Victor Fleming’s betrothed way back during the filming of Wings in 1926. They split shortly after, and her personality crept into the character of Lola Burns.
Also commonly referred to as Blonde Bombshell in period publications due to the belief that it could be mistakenly perceived as a war film.
The Three Stooges were briefly slated to make a comedic appearance, like they did in Dancing Lady, released the same year, but they didn’t make the cut.
The desert scenes where Lola meets Gifford were shot on location at the Saguaro National Park in Tucson, Arizona; the MGM production unit of thirty-five people was there for a week in mid-September 1933. It was here that love began further blooming between Harlow and her cameraman, Harold Rosson, who she’d propose to during production. They eloped to Yuma the day after production ended, at 4:00 A.M. on September 18, 1933. The justice’s eleven-year-old daughter had to wake him up to marry them.
Harlow recreates her bath-in-a-barrel scene from Red Dust in this film. Harlow, who retained her robe this time around, reportedly joked: “Thank goodness it wasn’t necessary for me to get in the rain barrel in Bombshell. I had to pick too many splinters out last time!
The lace wraparound negligee worn by Harlow in Bombshell adds another true-to-life dimension to the film as it was from her offscreen personal wardrobe (and can be spied in earlier publicity shots of her taken in 1932).
According to David Stenn, this was Harlow’s own favorite out of all her films.