PLOT OF RECKLESS:
Mona Leslie (played by Jean Harlow) is a musical star who has a reputation of being wild and reckless. After getting arrested for reckless driving on the way to a charity event where she is the main singer/dancer, Mona has to have her friend Ned Riley (played by William Powell) bail her out. When she arrives at the event she finds out that it was booked by only one man, Bob Harrison Jr. (played by Franchot Tone) who is a big fan of Mona’s and the president of her fan club. Soon Mona and Bob are dating and after a night of drinking the two elope. The next morning Bob remembers what he has done and from that moment on he starts to get in a depressed mood and angry with is life. With all his friends and family treating Mona like she’s not classy enough for Bob, Bob wants to run away with Mona to New York. Mona is able to talk Bob into not running away but the feelings towards her remain sour and they get worse when Bob finds out that his true love has married someone else. Feeling trapped in the marriage to Mona with no way out, Bob ends up killing himself. Now Mona has to face the world that believes she’s a killer, she’s not able to get any musical jobs anywhere, and she has been charged with the murder of Bob.

NOT WHAT I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE:
Reckless is an old movie, 76 years old in fact, where the plot is about a semi famous woman who gets married to a rich, high society man that’s not in love with her, and then finds herself having a life where now everyone hates her. I was surprised by the plot, the characters are more realistic than most characters I see in movies and a story that revolves around events that happen in life without the glitter of Hollywood put on it. When the movie shows how people, both public and in her life, turn on Mona after the suicide of her husband, I wasn’t expecting it.

The whole plot is that way, a story about what can really happen and does happen in real life. A woman who is not part of the rich society gets married into it, the rich resent her and make fun of her, and even though she is not sentenced to the murder of her husband, the public still believes that she is the killer and treats her as such. All she wants to do is live a life where she can sing and dance again while being with the man she loves and keeping her son.
It’s a strong story with some decent acting being done by Jean Harlow. Though Jean Harlow looks likes she is struggling to do the lip synching on the songs and the dance routines look as if she has done them for 10 hours straight with no rest and it don’t look pretty when she is doing the scenes with songs. Luckily enough there really are not that many of these scenes in the movie where it don’t hurt it any. What’s impressive about this movie is the story it tells of this struggling woman who is a strong woman but is rejected for an act she didn’t even do.

What I didn’t like about this movie was how the story points that are the most important, such as the suicide of her husband, the public hating her, having to fight to keep her son out of the hands of the father-in-law, and not being able to get any jobs as a singer anymore, these scenes just fly by to the ending of the movie. All these moments, the most critical moments of the whole movie, are shown in the last 20 minutes of the movie. During the other 70 minutes of the movie it’s about how the two men like her, then her marriage to the one, the struggle of fitting into a world that wants her out, and it all goes by slow. I would rather had the movie tell the story of how she met, married, didn’t fit in, and then the suicide of her husband being told in 20 minutes leaving the rest of the movie to tell how she had to first go to court for murder, being acquitted for the murder, having to face a public that hates her and feels like she did kill her husband, while dealing with the family of her dead husband and fighting for the custody of her son. This would have made the movie so much more interesting and with such interesting characters I would have really liked it. Though for a movie that’s 76 years old, I am still impressed at the story that was told and how well the quality of it looks. It’s not great, there’s some grain, some scenes are boring in the way it was shot with the angles, but it does look good for being so old.