Ronald Reagan plays attorney Neil Dillon in maybe not his first leading role, but certainly one of his first. It is a solid B-movie as the evocative title would suggest. Jane Bryan plays Connie Heath who (through a series of unfortunate coincidences) is accused of a series of crimes. Here's how it went: Connie's father rules his household with an iron fist and forbids Connie from buying a new dress to go dancing. Connie's co-worker Hilda convinces her to go out on the sly and loans her a dress to wear. Hilda is a fun-loving rule-beaker, and has actually "borrowed" the dress from the dry cleaners where both girls work.  At the Hula Club, Neil is out with his girlfriend Susan Hayward who realizes that Connie is wearing her dress. To make matters worse, the dress is damaged during the evening. The next day Connie is accused and fired. Hilda refuses to 'fess up and leaves town.  Neil turns out to be the attorney for the insurance company responsible for replacing the dress. He makes good the loss out of his own pocket so that the insurance company will not press charges against Connie, to whom he has taken a shine. Connie decides to strike out on her own in a different town where she hopes to earn enough to pay Neil back. In this different town, she runs across Hilda and stops to give her a dressing down. Unfortunately, Hilda is at that moment playing getaway driver for a bank heist, and Connie gets caught up in that. Hilda and her bank robber boyfriend are sent to prison, but Connie manages to convince the probation board that she is relatively innocent and is given probation. She travels back to her hometown where she finds that Neil is now Deputy District Attorney, and they become engaged. Hilda is eventually released on parole and returns to blackmail Connie. Hilda's boyfriend escapes from prison and causes even more trouble. Things turn out okay in the end.

"She's wearing my dress!"

Look out! Your dress is caught in the taxi door!

Familiar face: John Hamilton (Perry White to George Reeves's Superman) as the Police Chief

John Hamilton with the accused women

Lambert T. Hunkins is a timid office worker at a linoleum company.  He has been reluctantly dating Violet Coney, a pushy girl from his office, although he has a crush on Iris Mabby, a senator's daughter whom he has never met. He collects pictures of Iris from newspapers in a secret photo album. He has another private quirk: he likes to frequent estate auctions.

Out of the blue he receives a $10/week raise, and Iris and her domineering mother take the occasion to bully Lambert into engagement.  The bright point for him is that it gives him an excuse to go to the auction house, allegedly to buy furniture for a new apartment for three. While there he is awestruck by a slightly racy statue that resembles Iris Mabby. Despite all attempts at intervention by Iris and her mother, he buys the statue for $100.

It turns out that Iris was indeed the model for the statue, and the Senator wants to destroy it to avoid potential scandal. He offers Lambert $3000 for it but is refused. The newspapers pick up this story and Lambert gains notoriety as a screwball who values a plaster statue beyond reason. Some mobsters become interested in his inexplicably valuable property and determine to steal it. Iris herself visits Lambert and is charmed by him. Everything turns out well in the end.

Lambert is played by Frank McHugh. Violet is played by Jane Wyman and her mother is played by Cora Witherspoon.

The infamous auction

Trailer for He Couldn't Say No on TCM

"Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm" is the title of a classic 1903 book by Kate Douglas Wiggin.  It is also the title of a 1938 movie starring Shirley Temple.  Apart from the title, these two works have three things in common: a girl named Rebecca, a farm called Sunnybrook, and an aunt named Miranda.

In the novel, Rebecca is sent to live with her maiden aunts, Miranda and Jane, because her widowed mother cannot afford to feed or educate all of her seven children on the income from the family farm, which Rebecca nicknames "Sunnybrook Farm". Rebecca's life is not easy under the control of the irascible and parsimonious Aunt Miranda, but her imagination and bright personality see her through all the tough times.

In the movie, Rebecca (Shirley Temple) auditions to be "Little Miss America" as part of a new radio advertising campaign for Crackly Grain Flakes.  She wins the role, but due to a misunderstanding between advertising executive Tony Kent (Randolph Scott) and his assistant Orville Smithers (Jack "Tin Man" Haley) she is sent away thinking she has been rejected.  Her ne'er-do-well guardian/manager (William "Uncle Charley" Demarest) then leaves her with her Aunt Miranda who lives on Sunnybrook Farm.  Aunt Miranda is not fond of show people (and, okay, she is irascible) so when Kent and Smithers manage to track down Rebecca she will not allow her to participate.  Shenanigans ensue.  Shirley Temple dances with Bill "Bojangles" Robinson and sings a medley of her most famous songs, including "On the Good Ship Lollipop" and "Animal Crackers in My Soup".

Bill Robinson and Shirley Temple

Randolph Scott and Jack Haley

William Demarest

One more familiar face: Franklin Pangborn as an "emergency musician" for the radio broadcast.

Fresh out of med school, Dr. Jimmy Kildare declines to join his father's small town practice and instead heads off to a big hospital in New York.  He is one of a crop of young interns under the tutelage of crotchety old Dr. Gillespie, the brilliant but acerbic wheelchair-bound diagnostician. Young Dr. Kildare pulls ambulance duty and on his first trip responds to an unconscious man in a bar.  Interrupted by a call to a suicide attempt at a flop house, Jimmy sends the ambulance back to the hospital with the bar patient.  Joe the ambulance attendant feels no pity for the patient, assuming he is just a drunk, and does not follow Jimmy's instructions to administer oxygen en route.  The patient dies and it turns out he is a local political boss.  Jimmy takes the rap for Joe and earns a friend for life.  Jimmy is able to save the would-be suicide, who turns out to be an heiress with a mystery.  She is written off as a mental case by the hospital establishment but Jimmy flouts hospital authority to keep working the case and unravels the source of her depression.  Jimmy is fired as an intern but Gillespie hires him back as his assistant and protege.

This was the first of nine Kildare movies starring Lew Ayres as Jimmy Kildare and Lionel Barrymore as Dr. Gillespie.  Barrymore starred in six more movies as Gillespie without Kildare, after Lew Ayres conscientiously objected in WWII. There was one previous Kildare movie without either actor.

Familiar faces: Nat Pendleton as Joe the ambulance attendant; Marie Blake (Grandmama from "The Addams Family") as a receptionist; Monty Woolley (The Man Who Came to Dinner) as the psychiatrist treating the heiress; Samuel S. Hinds (George Bailey's dad from It's a Wonderful Life) as Dr. Kildare the elder.

Marie Blake and Nat Pendleton

Judge Hardy (Lewis Stone) is recruited to head a commission in Washington investigating the regional monopoly of a power utility.  The whole family goes along, of course.  Andy (Mickey Rooney) gets involved with the daughter of the French ambassador.  Marian gets involved with some society people who are just using her to influence her father's commission.  After a couple of man-to-man talks between Andy and his father everything turns out okay.

There were a couple of interesting phrases dropped in the movie.  Marian and her hometown boyfriend have an argument and he remarks, "Of all the school girl exhibitions I ever saw, this one takes a fur-lined teacup." There actually is a famous fur-lined teacup from 1936.  Check out this link to a piece of surrealist art by Meret Oppenheim.  It is currently at the MoMA. 

There are several times when Andy is practicing his French.  He always mangles the pronunciation horribly.  Once, after his dad agrees to buy him a tuxedo, he says "Gee, you're what they call 'un homme merveilleux'.  That means 'you're the berries' in French." 

Also, my favorite MCMXXXVIII dance, the Big Apple, makes an appearance in this movie.

Andy teaches Suzanne the Big Apple

Trailer for Judge Hardy's Children on TCM

Mrs. Hardy needs a little r&r and Judge Hardy has an old beau in need, so they pack up the family for a trip out West. The Judge must help his old girlfriend and her husband negotiate some water rights for their ranch.  Big sis Marian falls in love with a local (like she did in Catalina*) and decides to dump her boyfriend back home and be a ranch hand's wife.  I sure hope she settles down in Carvel in the later movies because that girl is not sensible when she travels.  Andy tries to show off for the ranch hand's 8-year-old daughter (don't worry, the ranch hand is a widower) and ends up breaking the leg of her horse.

Jake, the ranch hand's daughter, is played by Virginia Weidler, who sang "Lydia the Tattooed Lady" in The Philadelphia Story (1940).  She and Bonita Granville are my favorite MCMXXXVIII child actresses.


*A couple of months back my TiVo tricked me into watching You're Only Young Once, a Hardy Family movie about a vacation to Catalina Island.  I later found out that it was released in December of '37, so I didn't do a write-up.  My TiVo recently tried to get me to watch The Hardys Ride High from 1939, but once bitten, twice shy.

Standard Hardy cast:
Lewis Stone as Judge Hardy
Mickey Rooney as Andy Hardy
Anne Rutherford as Polly Benedict

Out West with the Hardys trailer on TCM

Lord Jeff with Freddie Bartholomew and Mickey Rooney.  We first meet Lord Jeff (Freddie Bartholomew) as the overly demanding child resident of a London hotel.  His lordship is condescending toward (and despised by) the hotel staff.  While shopping at a jewelry shop for a present for his mother, he is suddenly struck with some sort of stomach ailment and must be rushed back to the hotel.  Shortly thereafter an inspector comes to question him about another patron present at the shop who made use of the distraction to steal a priceless necklace.  It turns out that "Lord" Jeff is really an orphan who was running a con with his "governess" and the man who stole the necklace.  His accomplices escape but Jeff is arrested and sent to a trade school for homeless boys.  The school where his is sent, Dr. Barnardo's Russel Cotes Nautical School, trains boys to work in the British equivalent of the merchant marines.  Jeff is condescending and aloof there as well, but is eventually taught honor and pride by the example of star student Terry O'Mulvaney, played by Mickey Rooney.  Thus it is that Jeff declines to rejoin his con-artist former partners when they find and try to reengage him.  They still try to use him to transport the stolen necklace to New York by sewing it into the lining of his coat knowing that he will be assigned to apprentice on the Queen Mary.

Familiar faces: Charles Coburn as Captain Briggs, the dean of the school; Peter Lawford has a bit part as one of the new kids that arrive at the school with Jeff.