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The FIR Vault

THE GOLD-DIGGERS IN HOLLYWOOD

By • Sep 24th, 2010 • Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6

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Charles Winninger, Binnie Barnes, Alice Brady and Ray Milland in THREE SMART GIRLS

In STAGE DOOR (’37), in an elegant variation on the gold-digging theme, with a theatrical career rather than mere money as the prize, three young actresses are all involved with a middle-aged producer (Adolphe Menjou), for whom the term “casting couch” might have been invented. Gail Patrick, the anti-heroine, is unmistakably his mistress, Ginger Rogers is willing to be, and Katharine Hepburn is wrongly assumed to be. Patrick’s chauffeured limousine, expensive clothes and furs are smilingly attributed to her “Aunt Susan” – a euphemism that fools no one. By apparently compromising herself with Menjou (actually to protect Rogers), then getting the lead in his play (actually engineered by her father, unknown to her), Hepburn is resented by the other Broadway hopefuls until almost the end of the film.

As Don Miller notes in his B Movies hook in MEET THE GIRLS (’37). Lynn Ban and June Lang were cast as two chorines in a projected “Big Town Girls” series, apparently a belated attempt to revive the breezy Blondell-Farrell tradition, but even after a better second film, PARDON OUR NERVE (’38), the series did not catch on. By this time even Blondell and Farrell themselves, however unflappably brassy and sassy, were playing reporters, process servers, waitresses, Girls Friday, all lawfully employed.

Far more common was the sentimental softening of the gold-digger pattern into the Cinderella tale, as in THREE BLIND MICE (’38), in which Loretta Young, Pauline Moore and Marjorie Weaver played three sisters who use their small inheritance to put up a front by which at least one of them will trap a rich husband. Young pretends to be an heiress, Moore her secretary and Weaver her maid, and, of course, all three end with suitable mates, one actually rich.

Gail Patrick, Jean Rouverol, Constance Collier, Lucille Ball, Ginger Rogers and Ann Miller in STAGE DOOR

This was a plot that Fox liked so well that it was re-made twice within ten years as color musicals, first as MOON OVER MIAMI (’41), then as THREE LITTLE GIRLS IN BLUE (’46). All three versions were based on an English play by Stephen Powys, which had nothing to do with either THE GREEKS HAD A WORD FOR THEM or HOW TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE.

The three small-town sisters were not designing women of the world but as 100% pure as Doris Day at her most virginal; their maneuvers to help each other to advantageous matches make them more akin to the Bennetts in PRIDE AND PREJUDICE than to Zoe Akins’ coolly calculating, anti-romantic ladies. It is significant that the settings for their girlish stratagems in the three versions were respectively Santa Barbara, Miami and the Atlantic City of ’02, playgrounds of the presumably more gullible newly rich. Such Little Red Riding Hoods would have been quickly gobbled up by the more experienced wolves of Manhattan.

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