Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936)

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) is a thoughtful commentary on the Great Depression masquerading as a screwball comedy.  There are screwballs aplenty, to be sure, but director Frank Capra, as is his wont, manages to show humanity’s noble fight against cynicism in a world full of bad guys lining up to crush us.

Gary Cooper is Mr. Deeds, a flaky, tuba-playing writer of greeting card poems who could be called a misfit except that he fits in very well in the small Vermont community where everybody else is also marching to the beat of their own drum.  It is only when he goes to town – New York City, that he stands out as an oddball.  Mr. Deeds is idealistic, but suspicious of the motives of people who turn out to actually have ulterior motives—making him strangely canny for someone so naïve on the surface.  He is gentle, except for when he belts people in the mouth for pushing his buttons.  He is liberally generous to some, and yet expects to get value from his charity from others and admires those who have enough pride to not ask for his help.

Gary Cooper plays the role that fits him like a glove with such ease and believability that his co-star, Jean Arthur, no less capable in her trademark role as the sassy foil, makes it difficult for us to decide who is the more fascinating.  It is a case, perhaps, of two actors who employ the same method of effortlessly charming us by apparently just amusing themselves. 

Just as he can be a bit vague and preoccupied when spoken to, she also seems distracted by other thoughts, or maybe just has the ability to keep more than one idea in her mind at the same time.  When he is approached by the lawyers for the estate of his deceased uncle, he listens with only one ear, busy with his tuba, or dashing off to the window to watch a passing fire truck.  When her editor speaks to her, Jean Arthur is playing with a piece of rope or a puzzle toy, seemingly not listening but taking in every word he says.  Cooper’s and Miss Arthur’s characters are more alike than even they realize.

Gary Cooper is brought to New York to accept the inheritance left to him, which includes a large mansion and a great fortune.  We see he’s a babe in the woods in the big city, but the estate attorney, played by Douglass Dumbrille, steers him to social obligations and financial investments.  Mr. Dumbrille’s motives are not fiduciary, however.  He attempts to get Cooper to make him power of attorney so that he can control the money and live high off the hog on it, just as he did when the uncle was alive.

Lionel Stander is great in the role of the savvy, snarky man on board to control the press.  He is a gravely-voiced tough guy, with more of East Side in him than the gloss of Mr. Dumbrille, and is as disdainful as he is incredulous that Cooper is unfazed by the fortune and actually seems to not particularly want it.

We are treated to a glimpse of Franklin Pangborn as one of the harried tailors trying to measure and outfit Mr. Cooper as he animatedly discusses business with Mr. Dumbrille.

Jean Arthur is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist given the assignment of getting a story on the new millionaire in town, Mr. Cooper, and she pretends to be a poor soul trudging about town looking for a job.  When Cooper escapes his bodyguards for a bit of freedom, he encounters her one rainy night on the sidewalk in front of his mansion, fainting from hunger.  

He brings her to a cozy restaurant where she is revived with a meal, and after she tells him her story, assuring him she has just gotten a job and starts tomorrow and does not need further help from him, he is charmed, and calls over a violinist playing sad and sweet music.  

Her face, coyly partially hidden under the cloche hat, beams. She is enchanted and he very quickly falls in love.  

His face, reacting to the pleasure of treating her thus, is a marvel of sweetness and boyish enthusiasm.  One of his goals in life is to meet a woman who is a damsel in distress that he may save, and he thinks he has found her.

The romp begins when he recognizes famous literati at the next table and wants to meet them.  They are invited to join the party, mainly because the literary men know he is the famous newly rich composer of greeting card schlock and they want to make fun of his work.  Jean is wary, she’s not sure if he realizes he is being mocked, but he’s not as naïve as he sounds.  He knows very well they are mocking him and he calls them out for their bad manners.  It ends with him throwing punches, but one drunken poet, played by Walter Catlett, who gets a charge out of seeing his colleagues thrashed, befriends Cooper and wants to do the town with him.  Off they go. 

Cooper, introduced to alcohol, spends the evening on a spree, including such antics as feeding a horse a bag of donuts.  He will end up being brought home by two cops without his clothes.  Jean leaves the two drunken fellows with the staff photographers who are sneaking behind them, and heads home to write her article on Cooper, dubbing him “Cinderella Man.”  (However, we know that he’s not the real Cinderella Man; that’s boxer James J. Braddock, who was dubbed thus by writer Damon Runyon the year before Mr. Deeds was released.  See the movie Cinderella Man – 2005.)

Her editor, played by George Bancroft is pleased and wants to know how she managed getting through the bodyguards, the PR tough guy Lionel Stander, and a crop of flunkies.  She remarks offhandedly, “I was the world’s sweetest ingenue.”  She is to be awarded a month’s pay with salary. 

Cooper, reading the headlines the next day, is obviously furious and wants to know whom he can punch (Jean has used a false name with him), but he consoles himself with another date with his dream girl.

They ride the double-decker buses through the city and he gets to see Grant’s Tomb in a lovely moment of wonder and patriotism.  She is moved by his respect for history and great men, and he unknowingly throws a shaft of conscience at her with the remark, “What puzzles me is why people get so much pleasure out of hurting each other.”

On a park bench, they perform a duet of “Swanee River” and “Humoresque” with humming and pretend tuba playing and drumming with sticks on a trash can.  It’s pretty good. I would have liked to see them rehearse that one.

Later, we see Jean’s digs, which she shares with pal Ruth Donnelly, who unfortunately does not have a large role, but we see she is an artist while Jean types her column on a big old typewriter on the coffee table in the living room.  As she composes another hit piece on Cinderella Man, we see she is feeling guilty and having a change of heart.  “I’m crucifying him,” she says, and the theme of the hero being crucified is another favorite Capra trope.  We see it as well in Cooper’s role in Meet John Doe (1941), which we discussed here, and by James Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), also starring Jean Arthur, which we discussed here.

But he does make good copy.  He abruptly ends a soiree in his mansion for the opera set, scattering them with disdain and critiquing their pomp.  He writes a poem to Jean that sounds like the opening salvo to a marriage proposal.

Then the inevitable.  Lionel Stander discovers his dream girl and the writer of the articles is the one and the same, and he shows the proof to Gary Cooper, who is stunned, his very stillness and the way the director just lets the film roll is something wonderful.  There were not a lot of male actors who could use their faces as effectively as Cooper.  He truly had an ability to show the character’s innermost soul with his eyes and a very slight twitch of his expression.  We see he is shocked, but also deeply heartbroken as if he might cry.  After what seems like a long while, he turns his back to Stander and faces a window, lightly touching a curtain in an absent way.  

Stander moves us as well with a quiet, “If I knew you were going to take it so hard, I would have kept my mouth shut.  Sorry.”

Cooper, however, is dragged from the depths of despair by a man who breaks into the mansion with a gun.  He is a desperate farmer out of work and he accuses Cooper of being just another heartless millionaire.  He angrily reminds him of the outrageous antic of feeding donuts to a horse.   “You never give a thought to all the people starving,” and that there were people in the world who could not feed their children or themselves.  He is played in this wonderful scene by stage and movie veteran John Wray.  He did nine movies in this year of 1936, all bit parts and most uncredited.  Stander, by the way, did eight this year.

He collapses in tears and apologizes for brandishing a gun, saying he lost his head.  “Standing in the breadlines.  Killed me to take a handout.”  Cooper gets him food and watches him eat.  The wheels begin to turn and he gets an idea of what to do with the fortune he never wanted anyway.

He will offer 100 acres, a horse, a cow, and a plow to as many destitute farmers as his money will provide for, some 2,000, and he sets up headquarters in the grand foyer of his mansion, with staff to help, including the converted Lionel Stander, and soon his home is filled with applicants. 

Douglass Dumbrille is not happy, nor a pretender to the family fortune who shows up with his gold-digger wife late in the game.  Lawyer Dumbrille now brings a suit against Cooper, charging him with insanity and needing to be put under his guardianship.  H.B. Warner is the head judge, and the public hearing is swamped with deponents, expert witnesses, and a whole lot of “forgotten men.”  Jean is there, too, trying to make up to Gary Cooper and to help his case and keep him from being institutionalized.

He wants nothing more to do with her.  He will not even defend himself.  As part of his charge against Cooper’s philanthropy, Douglass Dumbrille builds his case on the aspect even more egregious than insanity: philanthropy itself. (Capra, a conservative Republican, had been once poor himself and did not mind pointing out the flaws in oligarchs.)  “In these times, with the country incapacitated by economic ailments and in danger with an undercurrent of social unrest, the promulgation of such a weird, fantastic, and impractical plan as contemplated by the defendant is capable of fomenting a disturbance from which the country may not soon recover.  It is our duty to stop it. Our government is fully aware of its difficulties.  It is capable of pulling itself up out of its economic rut without the assistance of Mr. Deeds or any other crackpot.”  One wonders if he includes President Roosevelt in that number.  One wonders if Capra did.

Two of the witnesses are a pair of sisters, played by Margaret Seddon and Margaret McWade, from Cooper’s Vermont hometown who insist he is nuts, or “pixilated.”  Afterward, when Cooper addresses them in his cross-examination, we learn they think everyone is pixilated except themselves.

But at first, he will not defend himself and remains stubbornly silent.  It is only when Jean, harassed by Mr. Dumbrille into admitting she loves Cooper, that he relents and gets the gumption to fight for himself.

We have our happy ending when Cooper retains his freedom, his fortune, and is allowed to give it away to help end the Great Depression.  He scoops Jean Arthur up into his arms and inexpertly kisses her. 

We learn that when money is absent, pluck will go a long way to aid in survival.  It might even have been true.

    

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

My new non-fiction book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II -- is now available in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a wide variety of other online shops.

Or here from my Shopify store if you want to buy direct from me and avoid the big companies.

And it is here in eBook, paperback print, and hardcover, from Amazon.

It is also here in paperback from Ingram.

And here in hardcover from Ingram.

From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books.  From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation. 

 

Heat Lightning - 1934

Heat Lightning (1934) is a study of independence and need, remorse and recklessness, and a profound yet subtle quest for redemption.  It is both gritty and yet surprisingly lyrical.  Aline MacMahon has one of her best roles as the dour, protective older sister running a desert truck stop.  The movie is not all hers, but all the characters moving around her like satellites never detract and sometimes don’t even complement her life that much—she is a true loner in heart and mind.  She seems to brush most of them off like flies. We will learn she didn’t start out that way.

This is my entry in the Classic Movie Blog Association’s “Cry Me a River: Tearjerkers Blogathon.”  I hope you’ll have a look at the other great participatingblogs.

As with really great movies, the setting is as much a character in the story as the actors, and director Mervyn LeRoy certainly knows this.  Here we have a weather-beaten diner with a ramshackle car repair garage and a gas pump out front.  There are a few cabins that comprise a small “auto court” of the day.  We are in the Mojave Desert, and just as traveler Jane Darwell remarks when she and her hapless husband, Edgar Kennedy, suffer car trouble and see the roadside café up ahead, “It’ll probably turn out to be a mirage.”

We may well imagine that motorists (or those pushing their enormous cars like Edgar Kennedy), will see the run-down road stop as a welcome respite.  All around them under the big sky is vast, dusty, and with nothing but a long, hot ribbon of highway leading them away from trouble, they hope.

Jane Darwell is the audience proxy when she discovers with surprise that the auto mechanic in the rough clothes is a woman.  She proudly remarks to her bumbling husband, “Only goes to show a woman can do anything she puts her mind to,” as the movie flashes a brief feminist message, though movies of the 1930s, tearjerkers or not, tended to show strong women more than films did in later decades when they mostly seemed to be reduced to victims or vamps.  Life is more complicated than that, and women are more complicated than that, and this is a lesson Aline MacMahon would like to teach to her younger sister, played by Ann Dvorak, but Aline has too many scars to be a graceful teacher.

Another carload of comic characters are the two young ladies boldly off to Hollywood and the middle-aged stranger who gives them a ride.  Played by Muriel Evans and Joan Dennett, they mostly manage to keep Harry C. Bradley diverted from pawing them, but they suffer his dull if smarmy company because it is a free ride.

Another comic trio that pops in but stays overnight are two wealthy divorcees just having left Reno, played by Glenda Farrell and the wonderful Ruth Donnelly (with the silly tongue-twisting name “Mrs. Ashton-Ashley”).  They bicker, insult each other, and make their chauffeur’s life miserable.  He is played by the reliable regular guy Frank McHugh, who has had just about enough of them. 

But lest we mistake this moody film for a comedy, we see early on that the oasis in the desert is not all relief and restoration, where one can guzzle Cokes and eat barbecued sandwiches while Aline MacMahon fixes your car.

Aline’s kid sister, Ann Dvorak, is champing at the bit.  She’s ready for adventure and romance and she’s not going to get it tucked away in this remote desert.  Aline’s contented refuge is Ann’s prison, and there is tension between them when Aline refuses to allow Ann to go to a dance in town with a ne’er-do-well young man, played by Theodore Newton.  He is older than she is, moves in fast company, and Aline knows that Ann would be getting in over her head.

Ann makes plans to sneak out at night and meet the guy down the road.

“You never had any emotions, you never had any fun!” Ann tells her.  But there’s more to Aline than meets the eye.

Enter two strangers, stopping for lunch and a cold beer.  They are city fellows, in suits and Fedoras, and one of them, played by Preston Foster, is friendly, easygoing and searching the place with the keen eyes of someone who knows how to case a joint.  His partner, Lyle Talbot, is less interested and would prefer they got back on the road.

We will learn, drip-by-drip, that they escaped from prison, robbed a bank in Salt Lake City and in the process, Mr. Foster shot to death a couple of cashiers.  He is cool as a cucumber, but Mr. Talbot is increasingly nerve-racked over their deed and the suspense of escape.

Preston Foster sees Aline MacMahon emerge from the garage in her overalls, work shirt, and bandana.  She stops short, stunned to see him.

Ahh, they know each other.

“What are you doing out here?” he asks.

“Making an honest living.  Something you wouldn’t know anything about,” she replies.  They not only know each other, they have a romantic past and it is the reason Miss MacMahon has self-exiled to the Mojave Desert.  Back in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the old days, she was a party girl, and Preston’s girl, and he done her wrong.

Ann Dvorak knows nothing about those days, and Aline wants to keep it that way.  We see that Aline’s admirable self-reliance and rigid work ethic might be penance, as much as a do-over.

Preston Foster takes a sly, calculated interest in rekindling their relationship, but perhaps not so much for love as for what use she can be to him.

When it becomes known that the flighty Ruth Donnelly and Glenda Farrell are traveling with some pretty hefty jewels, Mr. Foster sees his chance to bankroll his and Lyle Talbot’s escape.

But Aline, thinking only that he is pursuing her for herself, brushes him off.  “I’m happy here.  I know what living is about here.  I wouldn’t leave for anything.”  Though Aline gets some strong dialogue, she really doesn’t need it.  With her soulful eyes and quiet intensity, she commands every scene she’s in.  She could attract our attention by just tying her shoes.  “I left you and that whole rotten life.  Don’t you think I’m the same woman who used to eat out of your hand, because I’m not.  I’m a whole lot wiser.” 

Maybe.

Ann Dvorak is curious about her big sister’s relationship with Foster, but Dvorak is more preoccupied with the coming nightfall and her date with the bounder.

Night falls, and the men delay leaving, to Talbot’s increasing anxiety, particularly when the sheriff pops in to see if anybody heard anything of the escaping criminals.  The desert may cool off a bit, but heat lightning flashes in the distance.  A happy Mexican family camps out, and when a rancher from nearby shows up, played by Willard Robertson, who would be Aline’s suitor if she let him, we see another side to Aline MacMahon. She dresses up for the first time in probably many months, and entertains the two men interested in her, sitting outside in the night breeze, while her sister is away.  She is not flirtatious, but she is womanly and letting her beaus see that they each have competition.

Late that evening, when all is quiet, Ann Dvorak’s date brings her back, drops her off down the road. She is clearly infatuated with him, and he appears bored with her, and we might assume that he has taken his pleasure and now wants nothing to do with her.

She sneaks back into the rooms she shares with her sister behind the diner and catches Preston Foster sneaking out of Aline MacMahon’s bedroom.  Aha!  Ann smirks slightly.  It is a revelation about her stern, puritanical older sister.  Reportedly, this scene also got the film bad marks from the National Legion of Decency.

Having left Aline, Foster now purposefully goes to work on the safe with Lyle Talbot.  The safe in the diner is where Donnelly’s and Farrell’s jewels were put for the night.

Aline goes to Ann’s room, knowing that she sneaked out, and the sisters fight, and Ann throws Aline’s tryst with Preston Foster in her face.  But Ann is not triumphant over her sister's apparent hypocrisy; she is devastated, for as Aline begins to surmise, Ann is now, also, “a whole lot wiser.”

Aline, knowing the torture of resisting a man she really wants, tenderly embraces her sister, strokes her hair, understanding that her sister has also been ill-used by a man this night.  As she puts her crying sister to bed, and kisses her shoulder, she hears noise from the diner. 

Foster and Talbot are having trouble with the safe, and Foster is having trouble with Talbot.  Lyle doesn’t want to stay any longer and doesn’t want to do any more harm, but Foster is adamant. 

“You get that safe open. I didn't spend all that time with the dame for nothing.”

Uh-oh.

Miss MacMahon enters, with a gun, and shoots Foster.  After he drops, after a moment, she goes to him, her hair loose and long out of the familiar bandana.  She is quiet, shocked, and his last words, “I had it coming.”

Talbot asks, “What about me?”

She lets him go.

When others come at the sound of the shot, she wearily brushes them off, telling them she shot at a rat.

In the morning, when the guests leave and Ann is back to work in the garage, rancher Willard Robertson returns, concerned for her.  She shows him the body and asks him to take care of it, to tell the sheriff.

He tenuously asks if Foster meant anything to her.  She is honest and says he did, once.

He offers, somewhat cruelly, “Must be a big help sometimes being like you, Olga, not having any feeling.”

“I wouldn’t know, Everett.”

A newcomer arrives, like so many others, pleased at finding the diner and garage and auto court and says, “This place is sure a lifesaver, lady.”

She agrees it’s a pretty quiet life.

The Hollywood studio system of the day gave us plenty of froth and fluff, but was extraordinary in its ability to turn out so many quiet stories of powerful substance, and describing what life was like during the Great Depression in so many, many ways.

Please have a look at the other blogs posting in the Classic Movie Blog Association’s “Cry Me a River: Tearjerkers Blogathon” here.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

My new non-fiction book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II -- is now available in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a wide variety of other online shops.

Or here from my Shopify store if you want to buy direct from me and avoid the big companies.

And it is here in eBook, paperback print, and hardcover, from Amazon.

From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books.  From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation. 

 

Employees' Entrance (1933)

Employees’ Entrance (1933) is a study of cutthroat capitalism and the depravity that can sometimes exude from a ruthless employer.  If the Great Depression was no time to be out of a job, it could also be a stressful time to actually have one. So many hoops to jump through for the boss, and not one of them safe.

The boss is Warren William, who we last saw as the villainous employer in Skyscraper Souls (1932) here, made the previous year.  The two roles are not exactly the same, however, Mr. William might be headed for typecasting by this point.  In Employee’s Entrance, he is the manager of a large New York City department store, and his character, despite the vigor of his scenes, is less interesting than in the previous movie.  The banker of Skyscraper Souls was smooth, seductive, and devious in a psychological way.  In Employee’s Entrance, the department store manager is just a mean guy.  He takes delight in pushing up the sales numbers any way he can, including removing the deadwood in the office by firing longtime employees at whim.  His sexual pursuit of female employees is more a game of conquest than desire—he dislikes women and distrusts them.

Movies that take place in department stores are always fun, they give us a world unto themselves, a world that, in large measure, no longer exists in many towns.  But this story presents the store with less a sense of showcasing the marvel of American commerce and more a sense of dread for the corruption we do not see when we shop.

The movie begins with a montage of sales figures, always climbing through the 1920s, that decade of wonderful nonsense and consumerism, under the helm of Warren William’s successful regime, but then falling during the early years of the 1930s.  It is now 1933 and we are at rock bottom, and he has to work hard to pull a rabbit out of a hat.  We don’t feel sorry for him; he feels no compassion for his workers.  He tells his board of directors, who dislike him and want to replace him, that “There’s no room for sympathy,” and that to be successful, one must, “smash or be smashed.”

He does that immediately with a vendor, a manufacturer of menswear played by Frank Reicher.  Mr. Reicher tells him the order for coats will be delayed because he is having labor issues, but Warren William walks all over him, canceling the order to punish him. It will ruin Mr. Reicher and put him out of business.

Later on, Mr. William will toss out longtime employee Charles Sellon, a man who, probably like the actor, is in his mid-60s and will not be able to find employment anywhere else.  He will leap to his death from store’s fifth floor.  Waren William will remark, “When a man outlives his usefulness, he ought to jump out of a window.”

Another older employee getting the ax is Edward McWade, whom you may remember as Joe the linotype operator who gets the ax, along with most of the newspaper staff, in Meet John Doe (1941). There’s something more unbearably tragic about an older worker left without any hope of self-support, and it is this reason that Social Security was established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935.  The first recipient was sent a check in 1940, for $22.54, which was enough to rent a cheap room for a month.  Mr. McWade and Mr. Sellon, in the movie, were seven years away from any such benefit, and with little hope of finding a job when there were so many younger people, unless they had family to take care of them or a local or state almshouse had a cot for them, would be living under bridges until they died.

Ruth Donnelly plays Warren William’s secretary, who always enters with a stricken expression as if embarrassed and horrified at the behavior of her boss, and seems particularly sorrowful at the firing of Mr. Sellon.  She knows the cruel odds.  Miss Donnelly had been in films since the silents of the ‘teens, and had no such worries about work herself in the Depression.  A dependable character actress, she appeared in 15 films and shorts just in 1933 alone.

We have Alice White in a flashy role as hard-bitten yet kittenish Polly, a woman who works in the store and has been trying for some time to turn Warren William into her sugar daddy, but Warren is too smart for her.  He brutishly puts her down, and directs her, quite seriously, to turn her attentions to the ineffectual and somewhat befuddled member of the board left in charge in the owner’s absence to monitor Warren William’s cutthroat operation.  He wants Miss White to divert the old gent to get him out of his hair, she, getting well paid for this mission, turns her little girl flirtations onto Albert Gran, who is reticent at first as if he doesn’t know what to do with her, but then succumbs to her charms.  Scene-stealing Alice is a delight to watch.  The Depression-era tune, “Million Dollar Baby” is heard in the background.

One employee that Warren William can count on is our favorite, Wallace Ford, who also had a minor role in Skyscraper Souls.  Here his role is much larger as the up-and-coming assistant who comes up with clever marketing ideas.  He is given an office next to Warren William, and his fortunes are looking up.

We don’t know if Wallace Ford would, in the course of his burgeoning career, turn into another Warren William.  He may be headed that way, if not for a young woman who’s looking for a job.

Enter Loretta Young.  Warren William, inspecting his store, discovers Miss Young spending the night like a squatter in the store’s “model home.”  She does not know Mr. William is the big boss when she flippantly invites him to her “home” and confesses she has sneaked in to camp out and apply for a job in the morning.  He seems interested in her, amused at her ingenuity, much as he seemed interested in Wallace Ford for his marketing ideas, and knowing she has not eaten, invites her to dine.

Warren William has his way with her, gives her a job as a model in the women’s clothing department, and apparently has no further interest.  As he tells Wallace Ford, “This is no job for a married man,” and “Love ‘em and leave ‘em.”

But Wallace Ford meets Loretta Young and they date in secret, and then marry in secret.

Frank Reicher, the menswear manufacturer whom Warren William ruined is back, working in the store’s shipping department, but he is not bowed.  He openly hates Warren and is learning to be hard and ruthless, which impresses Mr. William, who hands him a $5,000 check to start his own business to partner with him, but Mr. Reicher rips it up in his face.  Spite is preferable to any business dealings with Warren William.

Interestingly, a stock of new toys crosses Mr. William’s desk and he examines them, noting that the “made in Germany” stickers might not sell well and he suggests putting on “made in Japan” instead.  “They’ll sell better.”  While it’s true Germany had moved over to the dark side in 1933, Japan’s imperialist machinations were not yet bold enough for Warren William to predict the future.

The climax of the story hits during an annual employees’’ welfare association ball held in the store after closing.  Warren William has no interest in partying with employees or their welfare, but he notes Loretta Young, a little tipsy after a fight with her husband, Wallace Ford, and helps her to get drunk, encourages her to go to his apartment in an upper floor and lie down.  Stupidly, she does.  He follows, and rapes her.

We do not see the crime, of course, but it is implicit since she has stated she hates him after her first encounter with him (which she never told Wallace Ford about), and she is in no condition to consent, and we already know he is not one for charm, only taking what he wants.

Wallace Ford has had too much to drink at the party as well, and wakes up literally under a table the next day, feeling terrible about his fight with his wife and wanting to make up with her. 

She leaves him a note that she is leaving but does not explain why.  She is shamed.  Warren William wants her to come to him and offers her a promotion, but is blunt that he will not marry her.  He wants a mistress.  She blurts out that she is already married to Wallace Ford.

Cue Warren William to tell Alice White to shift her attentions from Albert Gran to Wallace Ford to get him away from Loretta Young, but Miss White, a good egg, refuses.  He offers her $150 per week, and she turns him down.  Disgruntled, he asks her where she got her principles.

“I saved a couple out of the Crash.”

Great line.  Alice White has moxie. “Why don’t you go keep your nose out of other people’s lives before somebody smacks you down.”

He fires her, but she remarks that Albert Gran will not fire her “not as long as I can play chess.”

Eventually, Wallace Ford will stand up to Warren William, too, though Loretta Young will take poison to attempt suicide.  She’ll recover, and they will start over.

Frank Reicher, meanwhile, after Wallace Ford quits, has become Warren William’s new assistant, but will never kowtow to him.  “If I get the chance, I’m going to break you,” he tells Mr. William.  Success in business seems to be a Faustian endeavor.

The movies of the 1930s seem sometimes astonishingly frank about this, perhaps because the business world let so many people down, but the class war that seems ever on the brink never really materializes beyond guerrilla ridiculing of their betters by the working stiffs.  At least they were working.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century and Hollywood Fights Fascism and Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

My new non-fiction book, CHILDREN'S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II -- is now available in eBook here at Barnes & Noble, Apple, Kobo, and a wide variety of other online shops.

Or here from my Shopify store if you want to buy direct from me and avoid the big companies.

And it is here in eBook, paperback print, and hardcover, from Amazon.

From Cherry Ames, to Meet the Malones, from Dave Dawson to Kitty Carter - Canteen Girl, the Silent Generation spent their childhood immersed in geopolitical events through the prism of their middle grade and young adult books.  From the home front to the battlefield, these books are a window on their world, and influenced their hard-working, conformity-loving generation.