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Nothing Sacred (1937)
American Technicolor screwball comedy.
An eccentric woman learns she is not dying of radium poisoning as earlier assumed, but when she meets a reporter looking for a story, she feigns sickness again for her own profit.
The first screwball comedy filmed in color, Nothing Sacred also represents the first use in a color film of process effects, montage and rear screen projection.
Backgrounds for the rear projection were filmed on the streets of New York. Paramount Pictures and other studios refined this technique in their subsequent color features.
One reason that the film is considered among the most celebrated screwball comedies is that underneath the humor it incorporates sharply cynical themes of corruption and dishonesty. This film, along with Hecht’s The Front Page (1931) and its 1940 remake His Girl Friday with Cary Grant, caricatures the chicanery to which some newspapers resorted in order to get a “hot” story.
This was Carole Lombard’s only Technicolor film, and was quoted as saying that Nothing Sacred was one of her personal favorites.
| Directed by | William A. Wellman |
|---|---|
| Written by | Ben Hecht (screenplay) with uncredited contributions from: Budd Schulberg Ring Lardner Jr. Dorothy Parker Sidney Howard Moss Hart George S. Kaufman Robert Carson |
| Based on | “Letter to the Editor” 1937 short story Cosmopolitan by James H. Street |
| Produced by | David O. Selznick |
| Starring | Carole Lombard Fredric March |
| Cinematography | W. Howard Greene |
| Edited by | James E. Newcom |
| Music by | Oscar Levant |
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Production
company |
Selznick International
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| Distributed by | United Artists |
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Release date
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Running time
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77 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $1,262,000 |
