Saratoga

Jean Harlow died mid-way through the production of Saratoga, and her absence can be strongly felt in the film. During the first half of the film, Saratoga provides Harlow with a snappy, banter filled screenplay to fire off flirtations and sarcastic comebacks with equal fervor at Clark Gable. We’ve already started off on the right foot here, but then the film goes wonky, no longer the tightly scripted and paced rapid-fire romance with a background in horse track drama, instead Saratoga is working hard to cover up Harlow’s disappearance from the plot.

Employing body doubles and voice actors to give a vague impression of her in a small handful of scenes, these newly written segments draw attention to themselves and away from the story. It’s clearly someone doing a Harlow impersonation with a large hat covering her face, or her back turned towards the camera so we can’t see her face. Plot strands that were expected to pay off with her character and now rushed to completion with someone else doing the exposition, or newly invented scenarios to try to steer the film from its logical story beats into the same destinations but on a new track. Of course, the death of your leading star mid-production will do that to a film, so one wonders why they didn’t just scrap it all together or recast the main role.

As it stands, Personal Property is a better swan song for Harlow’s talents and particular star persona. Saratoga’s decision to forge ahead and paper over their problems remains questionable to me. Would the film had been better if the decision to re-start production with Jean Arthur had gone ahead? I don’t know. Maybe it would have been a more cohesive product, no one can really say for sure. But if Harlow had lived to the end of it, based on what was there, Saratoga would have been a fine way to say goodbye to one of the original bombshells, and truly gifted comedienne.