To peel back the curtain of how I have lately been choosing films to review for The Legionnaire, there are a few streaming services between which I alternate.  One of them is the idiosyncratic Retro Reels.  For someone who is increasingly enjoying classic cinema, it is a God-send.  At only a few bucks a month, it has a solid collection of old movies.  The only drawback is that there is no search bar, which can sometimes make for endless scrolling.  After all, how many of us these days go with the first option on which we land?  I put up with it because, again, I am beginning to appreciate the material better.  If nothing else, there are fewer mental gymnastics I need to do in order to give you some Catholic insight into a given motion picture.  I do worry that there may be a disconnect with some readers who care nothing for anything produced before, say, 2004.  Instead, what I hope is that you will come to enjoy this era of Hollywood as I have, and may Love is News (1937) be one example that leads you to that conclusion.

When an editor for a New York newspaper, Martin Canavan (Don Ameche), gets to his desk, it is not to learn that Love is News.  Instead, one of his hotshot reporters, Stephen “Steve” Leyton (Tyrone Power), is giving his old boss flowers as a means of handing in his resignation.  This takes place just as Martin receives a tip that the so-called “Tin-Can Countess,” Antoinette “Tony” Gateson (Loretta Young), is landing at Newark Airport.  This is frontpage worthy because she is returning home after a failed engagement to the foppish Frenchman, Count Andre de Guyon (George Sanders), the label owing to the title she could have married into had she stayed with the nobleman.  Despite his anger with the crack journalist, Martin sends a runner out to find Steve.  Steve proceeds to get the messenger drunk, but still manages to find a way to get onto Tony’s plane as it taxis towards the terminal.  She is dreading having to face the press, and he introduces himself off as someone who can get her past them without being noticed.  This involves sending her sister out to pose as the would-be noblewoman, but she comes back directly when she is found out and tells Tony about Steve’s real occupation.  By way of apology, Tony lets Steve come up with a new plan involving taking the plane to another part of the runway and him meeting her there with her car.  With him on his errand, she decides to play a joke on him with the rest of his colleagues waiting for their scoop: she announces they are engaged.  Martin learns of this when he is handed a competitor’s periodical with the headline proclaiming the upcoming wedding of the most famous and richest woman in the country, and he promptly fires Steve.  This happens a lot throughout the film.  Steve remains unaware of this until he sees the same story while chatting with Tony’s uncle, railroad magnate Cyrus Jeffrey (Dudley Digges).  Suddenly, Steve is a celebrity, and Tony delights in watching him attempt to deal with his newfound popularity.  Vengeance, no matter if it is a practical joke, is not Christian behavior, but I digress.  Trying to repair his image, he gets Martin to meet with him at a planned lunch with Tony.  Martin goes believing he is finally going to get a juicy article only to have Tony show up, pose for a photograph with Steve for another paper, and dash off as quickly as she appeared.  Steve goes after her, leading to her speeding and ending up in jail for her excessive velocity.  Again, he thinks he can get a story by telling the world about the privileged woman behind bars.  Yet, he ends up in the slammer when she tricks him into going to her car to retrieve some items.  While he is rummaging through her seats, she tells Judge Hart (Slim Summerville) that he is robbing her, and Steve is arrested.  The next morning, Uncle Cyrus arranges for both their releases.  Steve opts for walking home, but she tries to entice him into her car by pretending to be a crash victim.  He picks her up, but when he realizes she is faking it, dumps her into a mud puddle.  By this point, they have been sniping at each other in petty ways.  Hence, she comes to his apartment to say that she is calling it all off.  They share a kiss, but any good will is quickly dashed when she learns that he is going to sell their story to a vaudeville act.  She does not want this kind of exposure, so in exchange for this not happening, she is going to remain his fiancée.  Trying a different method of getting into his good graces, Tony persuades Uncle Cyrus to purchase the newspaper for which Steve sometimes works and make the young man editor-in-chief.  In this position, Steve is approached by Count de Guyon, who is selling the love letters he exchanged with Tony.  Steve purchases them for $10,000, and in front of Tony, further infuriating her.  Yet, when Uncle Cyrus comes to the office with the paper’s manager to force Steve to hand them over, he gives them the key to the safe where the notes are kept.  Tony opens the metal box containing them to find them burnt and a card stating that Steve had them destroyed.  This confirms for Tony how Steve feels about her, and thus she chases him down the block to apologize for her behavior.  She finally catches him at a phone where he is calling Martin to tell the newspaperman that the reporter is staying engaged to his Tin Can Countess.

This is something I have noted about older films before, but Love is News once more underscores the fluidity of relationships at that time.  These days we tend to think people do not take the opposite sex seriously (or whatever the sexuality), rather using another person for a variety of unloving reasons.  The two eras have more similarities than we realize.  In any case, the Bible is clear that this is not how God intended couples.  The first pairing, Adam and Eve, were together for hundreds of years.  The Old Testament does get murky on the issue of maintaining marriages.  It is not that God commanded the Israelites to be wedded repeatedly, as we see with the teachings on divorce or the fact that polygamy was countenanced in those days.  Indeed, Jesus tells the Pharisees that the only reason the bond between a man and woman who are joined in matrimony was allowed to be broken was due to the hardness of the human heart.  Today, the Church reinforces the gravity of the situation by saying that even if two people legally separate, they are still together in the eyes of God.  To address that situation there must be an annulment.  This means that the Church sees the marriage as never having been valid, which can happen for a variety of reasons.  However, it is not something entered into easily, and, unfortunately, this step goes too often ignored.  I bring this all up in order to contrast what you see in today’s film.  While Steve has never had a wife, Martin is on his fourth, and in the beginning, it looks like he might be wanting to move on to a fifth.  Martin is not old, either, and this is sadly not uncommon when it comes to movies of this era.  There is also Tony to consider, who while not wedded, appears to view engagements as something to be gotten into and out of as a matter of course.  Further, she announces the supposed wedding day for her and Steve as being a month away.  The Church has a process for couples looking to make their vocational vows.  It does not come with a prescribed period of time, but it does involve getting to know one another for a little longer.  I know things were different back then, but sometimes I wonder what was going through their minds.  If the day ever comes for me, I pray I enter into a marriage with a little more preparation.

Still, I do not mean to sound critical of Love is News.  Being from the 1930s, you are not going to see anything in it to tempt the eye in a negative way, though I was somewhat surprised to see a scene wherein Tony is in the bathtub.  Otherwise, it is a delightful little romantic comedy that gets a solid recommendation from this reviewer.