Hands Across the Table

Mitehell Leisen: Hands Across the Table (US 1935). Carole Lombard (Regi Allen), Fred MacMurray (Theodore Drew III).

I milioni della manicure / En fattig miljonär / Jeux de mains.

    US 1935. PC: Paramount Productions Inc. P: E. Lloyd Sheldon.

    D: Mitchell Leisen. SC: Norman Krasna, Vincent Lawrence, Herbert Fields. Story: Viña Delmar. DP: Ted Tetzlaff - b&w - Academy. PD: Hans Dreier, Roland Anderson. M: Sam Coslow. ED: William Shea. C: Carole Lombard (Regi Allen), Fred MacMurray (Theodore Drew III), Ralph Bellamy (Allen Macklyn), Astrid Allwyn (Vivian Snowden), Ruth Donnelly (Laura), Marie Prevost (Nona), Katherine DeMille (Katherine Travis), Joseph Tozer (Peter).

    Language: English.

    80 min

    Not released in Finland.

    35 mm print from Universal.

    Courtesy of Park Circus.

    E-subtitles in Italian by Sub-Ti Londra.

    Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna 2026: Easy Living with Mitchell Leisen.

    Viewed at Cinema Jolly, 22 June 2026.

Ehsan Khoshbakht (Bologna 2026): "If there is a prototypical Mitchell Leisen film – meaning a melodrama with comedy woven through it, sometimes the reverse – Hands Across the Table is the first full embodiment of that art. It also contains the essential ingredients: archetypal characters such as the timid male or the man whose self-confidence is on unsteady ground, paired with women who possess a pleasing sharpness and a gently insistent nature. His women’s clarity of thought makes the men appear childish by comparison; male ego or machismo is trimmed by feminine pragmatism. In Hands Across the Table, an unusually vulnerable and astonishingly beautiful Carole Lombard plays a manicurist torn between a wheelchair-bound, kindly Ralph Bellamy (the eternal loser of romantic comedies) and a flighty, self-centred millionaire playboy played by Fred MacMurray, whose wealth has been completely wiped out by the Great Depression. Lombard and MacMurray enter a race to marry the first available rich partner – one for happiness, the other for comfort. Leisen does not cop out by offering an easy answer to the question of love or money, as the contradictory, poverty-romanticising Frank Capra might have. It is not that one man represents love and the other money; rather, both are handicapped by their inherent weaknesses, physical and psychological. For Leisen, life is a matter of choosing which frailties one is willing to live with. There are moments of magic, such as the morning after a night of flirtation and playful sexual tension, when MacMurray, lying beside Lombard, sings The Morning After, mischievously implying that their passion was consummated, only for the film to later reveal that desire has been held in check through humour and patience. (The suggestive use of songs, as well as their deployment to evoke memory, is a recurring device in Leisen’s cinema. In his films, songs both pacify and stir.) This was MacMurray’s first notable role; he had never taken movies seriously until working with Leisen and Lombard, the latter in particular offering him advice on spontaneity, timing, and the intricacies of business dealings with the studio." Ehsan Khoshbakht

"Lubitsch's first film as production chief at Paramount, Lombard's first specially-designed vehicle and the untried MacMurray's big break. Norman Krasna's second script for Leisen used his 'misrecognition' ploy to set Lombard's ambitious manicurist in pursuit of impoverished playboy MacMurray, to the chagrin of her rich suitor. Lombard, radiantly sensual and witty, is the first of Leisen's dominant yet vulnerable women. 'The most amiable of 30s screwball comedies' (Richard Corliss)." (A Guide to World Cinema, capsule reviews from the National Film Theatre, London, Whittet Books / the British Film Institute, 1985)

AA: Hands Across the Table was Mitchell Leisen's first comedy. It was a Carole Lombard vehicle, and key members of the production team, including the cinematographer Ted Tetzlaff, were brought together by Ernst Lubitsch in the first assignment as Paramount's head of production. Lombard guided Fred MacMurray into the secrets of comedy. Ralph Bellamy was cast for the first time as "the third wheel" (and later typecast in The Awful Truth and His Girl Friday).

Lombard is the radiant heart in a story of two gold-diggers - Regi Allen (Lombard) and Theodore Drew III (MacMurray) - who find each other and one actual millionaire, Allen Macklyn (Bellamy), who stays alone. 

Allen is a former flyer who has been invalidized in a plane crash and is now confined to a wheelchair. He accepts his fate with stoic dignity and is disappointed but understanding when instead of him, Regi selects the "heel" Theodore (the Italian subtitle calls him "un mascalzone"). 

More diligently than Lubitsch Leisen idolizes the power of money. Lubitsch would have done the same, but in name only, while sowing seeds of doubt and irony here and there.

Lots of fun and wit and fast turns and amusing repartee are on offer. The screwball situations move from disastrous manicure to hopscotch to hiccups. Leisen succeeds in the difficult balancing act of screwball and sophistication. 

There can be a temptation towards the mechanical in comedy, also in romantic comedy, but by the time we reach the night sequence and "the morning after", there is a sense of genuinely moving human touch. Lombard's vulnerability is disarming. 

Might this have been a blow-up from a 16 mm television print from the times of the 1958 Universal deal covering Paramount features made before 1950? The low contrast, the variable visual quality, the often soft, often blurred image seem to point to that.