Polly Puts Gable In A Pulpit ...

Clark Gable and Marion Davies Try Out His-and-Her Lip Rouge for Polly Publicity

Uncertain Beginnings for a Star-In-Making: Polly Of The Circus (1932)

Talking remake of a yarn that had hit big for Mae Marsh in 1917, fifteen years separation of the two that might as well have been a hundred for sweeping change in movies. Polly's main title read "A Marion Davies Production," which I guess was about as meaningful as "A Buster Keaton Production" where he had as little creative control. Davies was maybe slipping: Polly barely took a profit, gain likely attributed to Clark Gable support on marquees. He worked like a plow horse that year --- honestly, how much sleep could the man have been getting? CG's wildly miscast as person of the cloth, clerical collar and all, which shows how experimental studio set-up was in days when stars incubated so rapidly. I like Gable's intro however: he's first shown wrestling a gym opponent to the mat, establishing he-man bonafides, then dons the reverse collar, this way assuring us he'll not turn-other-cheek to opposition. Metro would use the same gag to ID Spencer Tracy's two-fist priest in San Francisco a few years later, with Gable on receiving end of the knock-down punch.

Talk About Walls Of Jericho! Three's Definitely a Crowd So Long As That
Massive Bible Stands Guard Over Marion's Bed

Was Gable the Talkie's First Tendering of a Sexy Preacher Man?

Davies still has looks and a showgirl figure here, donned in tights for an aerial act that justifies the pic's title. In fact, Polly's circus is not unlike the one Greta Garbo hooked up with in Susan Lenox, and sure enough it was Gable that crashed those fairground gates as he would again in latter part of Polly. Metro liked their big-tops seedy --- was this to discourage circus attendance in favor of seeing more movies? All Polly needed was overlap with Freaks' cast membership to close the circle. Depression-era circusing was as desperate an enterprise as any struggling business, I suppose. Maybe movie folk identified with big-toppers in a final analysis. There's restraint of piety in Polly: customers weren't there to hear Gable preach to Davies, and being he's not bound by vow of chastity, there's pre-marital kiss-stuff with the pair in nightdress, proof of Christian folk heat-seeking as do we all. Fun here like with all 30's Metro is seeing stars manipulated upon a chessboard of day-to-day studio play, wrong moves often the most engaging ones.