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All that remained was Hopwood’s by now creaking ’19 plot, with a few Depression touches added. Once more a proper Bostonian (Warren William) accompanied by his lawyer (Guy Kibbee) comes to NY to rescue his younger brother (Dick Powell) from the toils of a supposed adventuress (Ruby Keeler). Mistaking her roommate (Joan Blondell) for her, he is maneuvered into writing a check for $10,000 to buy her off – not that she wants the money but only to teach him a lesson.

By this time they are in love, he approves his brother’s choice, and the girls’ most expertly mercenary roommate (Aline McMahon in the Fazenda-Lightner role) gets the lawyer. True gold-diggers, of course, were more interested in money than marriage, and not interested in working at all, so the ironic fact is that in no version of this story were the heroines ever really full-time gold-diggers at all – only hard-working girls trying to raise money for a show.

Though, presumably as a marquee attraction, the words “Gold Diggers” persisted through three more Warners musicals (…OF 1935, OF 1937 and IN PARIS), it became as meaningless as Paramount’s Big Broadcasts and MGM’s Broadway Melodies – merely an easily identifiable label for an annual musical. As with most such series, the law of diminishing returns very soon set in.

Meanwhile, however, the initial success of the GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933 led Warners to launch concurrently another, non-musical series that teamed two of the most proficient gold-diggers in the trade, Joan Blondell and Glenda Farrell, whose peppery, hardboiled personalities probably epitomize the type better than those of any other actresses. IN HAVANA WIDOWS (’33) they try to work an extortion racket on pseudo-pious parson Guy Kibbee, until Blondell falls for his son (Lyle Talbot). CONVENTION CITY (’33) is a variation, with many of the same supporting players, this time in the guise of a broad satire on the antics of American businessmen at an annual sales convention in Atlantic City. But when KANSAS CITY PRINCESS opened in November, ’34, the “Times” called it “shopworn”, noting that “the cynical gold-digger has gone out of fashion lately, and the photoplay suffers the ills of obsolescence.”

It is surely no coincidence that the heyday of the gold-digger was in the very year of Mae West’s all too brief reign. Her films are not usually considered in this connection, but surely her standard character of the wisecracking blonde entertainer with a broad and profitable experience of men is an 1890’s forerunner of the gold-digger of the ’20’s and ’30’s, just as her famous line about her jewelry, “Goodness had nothing to do with it!” anticipates Lorelei Lee’s “Diamonds are a girl’s best friend.”

At very least the huge success of SHE DONE HIM WRONG reinforced the popularity of quick-tongued, adventurous dames whom nobody could possibly mistake for the girl next door. Thus in HER BODYGUARD (’33) Wynne Gibson played a gold-digger named Margot Brienne (nee Maggie 0’Brien), whose patron (Edward Arnold) hires a detective (Edmund Lowe) to guard both her and her jewels, which she never takes off. Needless to say, the bodyguard does such a thorough job that he eliminates all other suitors, including his employer.

On the B level, LADIES MUST LOVE (’33), which must have been a low point in the career of the great German director, E.A. Dupont, dealt with four gold-diggers (June Knight, Sally O’Neil, Dorothy Burgess and Mary Carlisle) who sign an agreement promising each a split of the others’ spoils – broken when June falls for playboy Neil Hamilton, refuses a bracelet from him and the other three expose the contract, leading to predictable misunderstandings before the happy ending.

But with the advent of the Production Code, all that had to end. In Harlow’s THE GIRL FROM MISSOURI (’34), the heroine ends up marrying the son (Franchot Tone) of the man she had intended to take (Lionel Barrymore). Only Carole Lombard was allowed to give the gold-digger’s tattered banner a few last flings in THE GAY BRIDE (’34) as a chorine involved with gangsters and in HANDS ACROSS THE TABLE (’35) as a manicurist determined to marry for money who falls for Fred MacMurray, mistakenly thinking he’s rich but eventually accepting him, anyway.

In short, just as surely as the seriously presented kept woman, the once light-hearted gold-digger became technologically unemployed by the Production Code. Though both Ted Sennett in Lunatics and Lovers and Pauline Kael in her “New Yorker” profile on Cary Grant (July 14, ’75) quote a line spoken by Glenda Farrell in THE GOLD DIGGERS OF 1937 as typical: “It’s so hard to be good under the capitalistic system” this is just the kind of self-conscious observation a true gold-digger would never have made. In this particular film, called by the “Times,” “a disappointing Christmas package” the plot – a ghoulish one for a musical – centered on the efforts of Victor Moore’s business partners to murder him for his insurance.

By the later ’30’s a heroine could only be suspected or accused of gold-digging (e.g. Simone Simon in JOSETTE, Danielle Darrieux in THE RAGE OF PARIS, to cite two from ’38). If indeed she ever did harbor any such base mercenary motives, she renounced them before the end in favor of the right (poor) young man. As the opposite side of this counterfeit coin, the true gold-digger was accordingly reduced to the role of menace, comic (Binnie Barnes in THREE SMART GIRLS, ’37) or otherwise (Virginia Bruce in THE GREAT ZIEGFELD, ’36, as the dissolute Follies beauty who comes between Flo and his first wife, Anna Held). Sometimes even the designing ex-wife or catty fiancée, determined to wrest the hero from the heroine, the kind of character played by Astrid Allwyn, Leona Maricle and Frances Mercer, might be loosely described as gold-diggers, but obviously they were not the real pre-’34 stock.

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