Well, that's interesting. The first half of Frank Capra's previous film, That Certain Thing, was the weaker of the two halves while its second half was kind of great, and we get the exact opposite here with So This is Love?, a romantic boxing comedy. Continuing to hone his ability to combine comedy with drama, Capra molds the beginning of the story that has the stronger dramatics while the second half tends to be more purely silly and operates more on coincidence rather than purpose.
I'd call the first twenty-five minutes or so of So This is Love? The best film that Capra had made up to this point. It's a touching little portrait of a young dressmaker, Jerry (William Collier Jr.) who pines after the pretty girl who works at the deli across the street, Hilda (Shirley Mason), who, in turn, pines after the up and coming boxer Spike (Johnnie Walker). When Spike goes around town, forcing people to buy tickets to the boxers' ball, he dismisses Hilda was without class while forcing Jerry's boss to buy two tickets. Jerry takes the opportunity to finally ask Hilda out, and she gleefully takes him up on the offer, especially when he offers her access to any dress in his shop if she'll go. She's going to show Spike that she does have class at that ball.
Where the film goes interesting and surprisingly touching is that when Jerry takes umbrage at Spike stealing his girl away during a dance and taking her to a private room, Hilda sees the brute that Spike is and the good guy that Jerry is. He's outmatched physically, and she ends up falling for him as he tries to stick up for himself. It's not handled melodramatically but surprisingly quietly as Hilda just goes from falling into Spike's arms to being scared of him to rushing to Jerry's defense and patching up his black eye with a slab of meat. It's a nice progression of emotions that's entirely dependent on performance to sell, and Mason sells it surprisingly well.
The dramatic turn is when Jerry decides that he's going to toughen up to face down Spike at some point in the future, using the help from Otto (Carl Gerard) to learn the basics of boxing, and this is where the film decides to lean more fully into silliness and comedy. I don't mind the comedy at all, some of it is quite good, but the actual movements of the plot get hung on coincidence and luck more than anything else, making this second half more a display of gags along the lines of the work Capra was doing with Harry Langdon than anything else.
Essentially, after a week of training, Jerry is feeling good about himself, and it's the night of Spike's boxing match with another pugilist. That pugilist accidentally hurts his arm in a window right before the bout while Otto suggests Jerry to replace him. What I do like about this is that the film doesn't make believe that a wimp with a week of strength and boxing training could take out an amateur boxer in a straight bout. Instead, Hilda, still somewhat smitten by the young man who tried to stand up for himself despite the terrible odds, leans into Spike's overconfidence and gets him to eat heartily before the match (with an emphasis on pickles and milk, some kind of combination that seems to have fallen out of the collective consciousness because I had to look up to find out that the combination causes nausea).
The boxing bout is amusing, though it's not like what Chaplin pulled of in City Lights, and it ends with the small guy triumphing over the big guy, what is quickly becoming a Capra staple. He's out there to tell stories that make you feel good, that the underdog can win, and that there are such things as happy endings. I don't object to that at all. I enjoy it when I see it, but the levels of coincidence and luck to bring it all together just feel lazy to me.
Still, there's the fun bit with Hilda running back and forth from one dressing room to the next while some random guy in a towel keeps trying to hide his shame from her whenever she comes. That's pretty funny, and it's surprisingly well placed in between moments that feel a bit weightier, implying something about how Capra saw the intersection of comedy and drama, about how heavier moments could be intercut with lighter ones to prevent things from getting too much. That's honestly a difficult thing to learn to balance, and Capra was doing it well from the beginning.
So, it's off balance in the opposite way that That Certain Thing was, but it's still winning and amusing and a good watch, even if the first thirty minutes is better than the rest of the film or the film as a whole. This Capra fellow, he was going places.
