Hard to Get with Dick Powell and Olivia de Havilland.  Maggie Richards (Olivia de Havilland) is the daughter of a wealthy Park Avenue family.  In a pique she declares that she will not be accompanying the family to their summer house in Newport and takes off for a spur of the moment drive.  On a country road, she finds herself in need of gas and stops at an auto court managed by Bill Davis (Dick Powell).  She is outraged to learn that the $3.48 (fourteen gallons of gas and a quart of oil) she owes cannot just be "charged" to her father.  Bill insists that she work off her debt by cleaning the ten cabins of the motor lodge.  She does so, but not willingly, and she vows to get revenge for this humiliation.  She returns the following day full of apologies and woos Bill, setting up a dinner date. She pretends to be a maid in her Park Avenue house and learns that Bill is an aspiring architect with a business idea.  With this knowledge she sets him up for a series of humiliating business pitches to her father, Ben Richards (Charles Willinger), and his friend and competitor, John Atwater (Thurston Hall).  To everyone's surprise and despite getting the bum's rush over and over, Bill never ever EVER gives up. Until, that is, he learns that he is the target of a joke and washes his hands of the lot of them.  Then Ben Richards and Atwater cannot rest until they get a piece of Bill's business plan, and Ben must patch up Bill and Maggie's romance as well.

Dick Powell and Olivia de Havilland

Dick Powell sings "You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby" and later dresses in blackface and does a Jolson impersonation.

Familiar faces:
Penny Singleton (from the Blondie movies) as Maggie's personal maid
Melville Cooper (Sheriff of Nottingham from The Adventures of Robin Hood) as Mr. Richards' valet
Tom Fadden* (the toll keeper from It's a Wonderful Life) as a gas station attendant
Looks like I was wrong about this one.  It was Irving Bacon.

 *IMDb doesn't even list this one!

Gold Is Where You Find It with Olivia de Havilland, George Brent, and Claude Rains.  This is a classic farmers vs. non-farmers Western.  In this case the non-farmers are hydraulic gold miners.  It is set in 1879 and the simple panning and digging of the original California gold rush has been replaced by huge water cannons that turn mountains into silt.  The run-off of these operations is destroying the good wheat-farming land downstream.  Claude Rains plays the patriarch of a wheat-farming family who leads the agrarians in attempting a peaceful victory over the gold miners via the judicial system.  The gold miners are unscrupulous San Francisco fops who drink cocktails instead of straight whiskey and plan to continue at any cost.

This movie is in Technicolor (my fourth, I think) and is directed by Michael Curtiz.  I am coming to learn that Curtiz was king of the action sequence.  He was the second director of The Adventures of Robin Hood and you can really see the increase in energy half-way through that movie.  This movie ends with George Brent blowing up a dam to destroy the mining camp.

The Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland.  At last, a true color movie (The Drum, my other color movie, was very muted).  I can't imagine I can tell you too much about this one, except that if you haven't seen it in a while it holds up as good as the memory.  I would really love the opportunity to see this on the big screen sometime.  This is my third Errol Flynn movie, my second Olivia de Havilland movie, my second Basil Rathbone movie, and my second Patric Knowles movie.  My queue is still full.

Four's a Crowd starring Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Rosalind Russell, and Patric Knowles.  This is a madcap, screwball comedy.  There is not really a consistent story arc, things just keep happening.  Rosalind Russell is a reporter, like in His Girl Friday.  There is a nice small part played by Margaret Hamilton, the Wicked Witch of the West, and an appearance by my pal Franklin Pangborn, not as a hotel clerk but as a valet.  Rosalind Russell is exhausting.