PLATINUM BLONDE: a forgotten man steals the show from legends in the making

I've never understood the fuss over Jean Harlow.
Film historians trumpet her as one of the great stars of the Golden Age of Cinema, a sexy blonde bombshell cruelly taken from us in her prime. She was undoubtedly a star but as for being great and/or sexy, I'm just not convinced.
When I watch Jean Harlow I see a trampy, rat-faced woman with ridiculously dyed blonde hair who's about as sexy and seductive as a courgette. And, after watching her in PLATINUM BLONDE, I realise she's also impressively big-hipped. Director Frank Capra really should have taken more care to avoid shooting her full on from the back. She's almost wide enough to project the film onto.
She's also miscast as Ann Schuyler, the well-bred daughter of a wealthy New York family who scandalizes her relatives by marrying Stew Smith, a common newspaper reporter whom she first encounters when arrives at her palatial home to dig for dirt on her brother's broken engagement.
She'd have been better off swapping places with the equally miscast Loretta Young, who's too young, fresh faced and delicately beautiful to be convincing as Gallagher, Stew's fellow reporter who's secretly in love with him. Director Capra tacitly acknowledges the implausibility of her part with his failure to show her actually doing anything remotely journalistic. Sure she has her own desk in the newsroom and hangs out in the same speakeasies as Stew but we never see her doing any work

The one piece of casting that's spot on is Robert Williams as Stew. I'd never seen or heard of him before this film but I was immediately taken with his sleepy-eyed, laid back charm and relaxed delivery. His portrayal of Stew Smith is completely without artifice. Williams acting style is refreshingly natural and unaffected at a time when many films and actors came across as mannered and stagey as they attempted to adjust to the demands of talking pictures. Compared with Williams the rest of the cast PLATINUM BLONDE act as if they're appearing in a lethargically directed filmed stage play.
I looked up Williams on IMDb and discovered that the reason why I'd never heard of him was because he died from a burst appendix in November 1931,just 4 days after PLATINUM BLONDE opened. The early reviews reportedly hailed him as a star in the making and it's interesting to speculate on whether he really had what it took to become a star or would he have been elbowed aside by the young Bing Crosby with whom he shared a very similar acting style?
All we know for sure is that his two co-stars and the director went on to become legendary names while Williams is a forgotten footnote in Hollywood history. Dying young didn't work so well for him.