The Mad Miss Manton takes place during the Great Depression. It is about a rich socialite and her gaggle of debutantes who spend their nights holding lavish parties, playing ridiculous pranks, and generally living lives without a single care in the world. Sometimes their parties are for various charitable causes, but generally they don’t seem to have any concept of life outside their rich, privileged bubbles, or the hardships that have befallen the common man.
Buy The Mad Miss MantonAnd yet, the film seems to forgive them for it. While a few characters disparage these women and how the rich neglect the problems of the poor, the film is completely on the side of Manton and her friends. Made in the later parts of the Depression when millions of very real poor people were struggling, I think the film casts itself, and its characters, as a breath of fresh air. When life is tough, sometimes you need to watch glamorous people having a marvelous time just to lighten the mood. I know that during these current dark times, sometimes I want to turn on something light and frothy to distract me from the news. The Mad Miss Manton absolutely did that trick.
Melsa Manton (Barbara Stanwyck) is rich, young, and beautiful. She loves nice things, lavish parties, and performing elaborate pranks with her friends. As the film begins, she’s returning home from a party and takes her three dogs out for a walk. She sees her friend Ronnie Belton sprint out of a house and quickly drive away. Bored, she decides to investigate and finds a dead man inside the house.
She runs and calls the police, but they don’t believe her. Partially this is because she’s dressed in a ridiculous costume, partially this is because her pranks have caused run-ins with the police before, but mostly, it’s because by the time the cops get there, the corpse has disappeared.
Peter Ames (Henry Fonda), a working-class editor of a newspaper, writes a scathing article about how Miss Manton has once again wasted the valuable resources of the police department. She, in turn, sues the paper for libel to the tune of one million dollars.
To prove her case, she and her gaggle of debutantes attempt to solve the murder on their own. They are pretty good at it, too. They are a superbly dressed, wise-cracking mob who are able to open any door and talk to anyone they want.
At first, Ames follows Manton around trying to convince her to drop the libel case against him. But soon enough he’s fallen in love, and then he’s following her around to protect her. There is a lot of rather out-of-date silliness full of him telling her she’s going to marry him whether she likes it or not and how she really needs a good spanking. But somehow the fact that it’s coming out of Henry Fonda’s mouth makes it palatable. It helps that nobody is taking anything particularly seriously. There is a murder to solve (and then another as someone else winds up dead), but it is all played like a parlor game being played by socialites.
The jokes are often rather dated (there are several references to people and events that went right over my head), and the one-liners don’t often land. My favorite:
Melsa Manton: Helen, you search the upstairs.
Helen Frayne: Oh, no! I was never much of an individualist. If the upstairs has to be searched, we’ll search it together.
Dora Fenton: Why, that’s communism!
got a chuckle out of me, but I found I rarely laughed out loud through the entire movie. That’s not to say I wasn’t enjoying myself. The entire film is utterly charming, and the two leads are marvelous. In some ways this feels like a dress rehearsal for The Lady Eve, made a few years later, which also starred Stanwyck and Fonda. That’s a much better movie than this one, but The Mad Miss Manton is a frothy appetizer well worth watching.
Warner Archive presents The Mad Miss Manton with a new 4K scan or the original nitrates and it looks fantastic. Extras include two Looney Tunes shorts – Porky the Gob, and The Penguin Parade – and the film’s trailer.
