OVP: The Cowboy and the Lady (1938)

Film: The Cowboy and the Lady (1938)
Stars: Gary Cooper, Merle Oberon, Patsy Kelly, Walter Brennan, Fuzzy Knight, Mabel Todd
Director: HC Potter
Oscar History: 3 nominations/1 win (Best Sound*, Score, Original Song-"The Cowboy and the Lady")
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

We continue going backward chronologically (though, spoiler alert, this will end this afternoon as we'll be moving into the late 1950's for our final movie) in our theme week salute to the Oscars and their music categories, this time going nearly to the beginning with 1938's The Cowboy and the Lady.  The Cowboy and the Lady is the kind of movie that got nominated a lot in the early days of the music categories-relatively innocuous, a kind of throwaway B-movie in the careers of two big stars of the era, in this case Gary Cooper and Merle Oberon.  One of the things about these movies that I've found is they run the length from either hidden gem to "movie you'll forget in a week."  As I do love westerns, and this one was a romantic comedy to add a little unusual patter behind the film, my hope was this was in the former category, but sadly, despite some charming moments, it falls decidedly into the latter.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Mary Smith (played by Oberon, given a moniker that doesn't make the audience confident we're getting a lot of originality), who is the daughter of a presidential hopeful but wants to go out and see the world.  One night her two maids (Kelly and Todd) take her out for a night on the town with three local cowboys, and in the process she meets Stretch (Cooper), a handsome but inexperienced cowpoke who thinks that she's swell, but doesn't realize that she's not a maid, but in fact the daughter of a wealthy-and-important man.  Mary continues this lie because she wants Stretch to marry her, and he does...but then realizes that she was lying to him, and her father doesn't approve of the union as it will ruin his political chances.  After some confusion, of course, everyone realizes what's "important"-Mary goes back to live the simple country life with her new husband and her father wants his daughter's happiness, so he drops out of the presidential race so that she can enter this union without pressure.

The film is really anti-progressive (there's never consideration that perhaps Stretch should try and fit into Mary's world except for one dinner table scene that feels like it was pulled straight out of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, a more famous Cooper picture), but you'd expect that.  What you might not expect is how listless the two leads are.  While Oberon isn't really my cup of tea (she always plays her characters so surface-level and breathlessly), Cooper can be marvelous with the right role, but he doesn't find it here.  Instead, he just plays Stretch as unusually handsome & bizarrely dimwitted (while still a chauvinist).  Weirdly it's not perpetual scene-stealer Walter Brennan who takes the picture from the two leads, but instead Patsy Kelly, who is by-far the best part of this movie as a wisecracking maid, and an actress I want in every movie I see from the 1930's from now on.

While none of the film's three Oscar nominations are what you'd consider "all-timers," they're all better than the movie.  The sound work is great in some of the outdoor sequences (particularly highlighting the music on the beach), and during the scenes where we're using multiple rooms for sight gags (particularly when a befuddled Gary Cooper doesn't realize that not only has his wife returned to their new home, but also that she's become a fixture of his mother's and friends' lives without realizing it).  The score is playful, charming, and fun, if not all that memorable, while the Best Original Song sticks out as a weirdly moving number for a film of this nature.  It would be treated more romantically than it is in this movie in later recordings of the song (a melancholy, straight-up romantic ballad than the drunken tossaway number it is here).  The song isn't really that important to the film, but it's a truly lovely piece of music, the kind of old (OLD) school country song that is right in my wheelhouse.  It's easily my favorite part of this otherwise kind of dismissable picture.