Owsley, who was the second male lead in Honor Among Lovers (HAL), is little known and seldom remembered today. Too bad, because he had a special acting talent that enabled him (like in HAL) to convincingly play both straight "good guys" and edgy "bad guys" at one and the same time. In the 1940s, that skill was also represented by several roles created by the young Vincent Price. Owsley could project menace quite easily, and you were never sure exactly what he was going to do next. The famous film historian Lawrence J. Quirk best described Owsley as " a brilliant actor who died early in life (and) had in common with another goose-pimply-grater, Dwight Frye, an ability to make the collective audience's hair stand on end. He came on with a sandpaper-oozy-with-glue repellence that perfectly contrasted with the handsome profiles and bejeweled shapelies around him." In HAL, Owsley certainly provided a clear distinction to the matinee-idol like appearance of stalwart Fredric March in one of his entertaining early leading man roles. And strange as it may now seem, Owsley gave us a performance in HAL that made it seem plausible to believe that he and Claudette Colbert (in only her eighth movie) could end up as a real married couple in the film!
HAL's dense plot and curious title are pretty much irrelevant when considered by today's audiences. However, contemporary viewers of HAL will be almost immediately struck by its pre-code references to pre-marital sex, workplace sexual harassment, marital physical violence and adultery that were made without batting an eyelash! The early feminist director Dorothy Arzner kept the proceeding moving at a brisk pace, and enabled March and Colbert to look quite handsome, beautiful, and charming.
While HAL is not a particularly memorable film, it does stand out as a cinematic record that captures March, Colbert, Owsley and director Arzner at the dawn of their noteworthy movie careers. While Owsley and Arzner soon faded into obscurity, March and Colbert would shortly become very significant in Hollywood and emerge as film stars of the very first rank for many years to come.
One last word about the long forgotten Monroe Owsley. Quirk in his illustrated biography of Claudette Colbert stated that Owsley was given a rather unflattering nickname by his fellow colleagues "because his sadistic treatment of the fair sex on screen .....came off as serpentinely evil.". While that may be a harsh way to refer to a fine actor's rather unique talents, it does remind us of just how remarkable and varied the roster of performers was during the Golden Age of Hollywood.
