Friday, July 26, 2024

Young Man of Manhattan (1930)


IMDb plot summary: Toby McLean, a reckless sports writer on a New York City newspaper, covers the Gene Tunney-Jack Dempsey heavyweight-championship fight in Philadelphia. There he meets Ann Vaughn, a feature writer for another newspaper, and they get married after a whirlwind romance.
Directed by Monta Bell. Starring Claudette Colbert, Norman Foster, and Ginger Rogers.

Young Man of Manhattan follows a husband-and-wife pair of newspaper writers trying to make it big, but things go wrong when she starts to gain fame and outearn him. He doesn't handle his jealousy well, and the two try to keep their relationship going despite all the stress her job brings. Look, it's 2024, I'm going to have a real hard time rooting for a couple to get back together when he's so deeply insecure about earning less than her, so I'm already uninvested in the key drama of the story, and he never proves me wrong. Claudette Colbert plays the woman and she's vastly more interesting on her own, and I'd rather the story was just her rocking the newspaper world. Any time her husband gets involved or their marriage is on the rocks, I lost interest real fast. Plus it's another one of those examples of 1930 movies I constantly had to look up the plot of to remind myself what it is, because the title bears almost no relation to the plot itself. Not one of the better rom-coms from this year, for sure.

How it entered my Flickchart:
Young Man of Manhattan < Love Exposure
Young Man of Manhattan < In the Line of Fire
Young Man of Manhattan > Mission to Mars
Young Man of Manhattan < The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
Young Man of Manhattan < Simone
Young Man of Manhattan < The Killing of Sister George
Young Man of Manhattan > Jumper
Young Man of Manhattan > For Love of the Game
Young Man of Manhattan > Mr. Hulot's Holiday
Young Man of Manhattan > Run Fatboy Run
Young Man of Manhattan < Father Brown
Final spot: #3380 out of 3929, or 14%.

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