Thingy of the blog Pondering Life wondered aloud yesterday when Carole Lombard will crash this party, which prompted a bit of research on my part. Turns out she could have crashed this party at pretty much any time. Did you know she made her first movie in 1921 at the age of 13? I didn't anyway, but she did, a small part as a tomboy under her birth name, Jane Peters, in a silent romance/caper flick called A Perfect Crime.That's Jane Peters there on her knees.
Lombard made 78 movies before her untimely death in 1942 at the age of 34. At least four of those movies will require special attention: Howard Hawks's Twentieth Century, which along with Frank Capra's It Happened One Night, gave us the screwball comedy; My Man Godfrey, Lombard's only Oscar nomination, and arguably William Powell's finest role; Nothing Sacred, another screwball classic co-starring Fredric March; and her last film, Ernst Lubitsch's To Be Or Not To Be, which personally, I think is Lombard's best performance.
In the meantime, something to dream about:
