Genevieve Tobin was the pre-Code third wheel: the friend who climbs into the husband’s taxi and starts on her stockings. She played the type with more relish than it needed, and Hollywood rarely gave her anything larger to do with it.
Fi1m perspective
Mitzi Olivier gets into a Paris taxi in the opening minutes of One Hour with You (1932), finds a married doctor already sitting in it, and begins adjusting her stockings. Chevalier turns to the camera to tell us he is not interested. Genevieve Tobin does not turn to anyone. She keeps her eyes on him and her hands on the stocking, and leaves us to work out for ourselves how the rest of the film is going to go. It is a small part in a picture that belongs to its leading man, and she is the liveliest thing in it.
That was the job she was hired for. Tobin came to Hollywood in the early 1930s after a long stage career: a child actress in New York around 1910, then Broadway through the 1920s, with her biggest stage success in Fifty Million Frenchmen in 1929. She said later that starting on the stage and moving to pictures “has done me no harm”, and on the evidence it did not. The films gave her leading roles at first and then supporting ones, nearly always in comedy, nearly always as the woman who is not the wife. The type was flirtatious, self-involved and better dressed than everyone around her, and she played it with obvious relish.
What works is the timing. In the Lubitsch film she never plays Mitzi as a villain; she plays her as a woman having a wonderful time, and the comedy comes from how little she cares who notices. We found ourselves, against our better judgement, rather hoping she would get her way, which tells you how the part was pitched and how well she pitched it. What works less well is everything the type could not carry. She was praised in her day more for her looks and her clothes than for depth, and even people who liked her thought of her as a medium-weight performer. She could be worldly and bored to good effect, as the wife in The Petrified Forest (1936), and she did a turn as Della Street in The Case of the Lucky Legs (1935), but after the mid-1930s the parts shrank to second leads and the standout chances stopped coming.
She made her last film, No Time for Comedy, in 1940, directed by William Keighley, with whom she worked four times, and then stopped. Start with One Hour with You. It is a Chevalier picture and it knows it, but every time Tobin walks into a scene the film has to decide whether to look at him or at her, and for a few seconds it always chooses her.
Biography
Genevieve Tobin was an American actress. She played Mitzi Olivier in the film One Hour with You (1932) and appeared as Mrs. Chisholm in The Petrified Forest (1936).
Tobin began her career as a child performer and later worked extensively on the New York stage. Her Broadway credits included Cordelia in a 1923 production of King Lear and a role in the 1929 musical Fifty Million Frenchmen.
She appeared in numerous comedy films during the 1930s, often in supporting roles opposite stars including Jeanette MacDonald, Cary Grant and Warren William. Tobin married director William Keighley in 1938 and retired from acting soon afterwards.
