Hot Saturday (1932)

Director:

William A. Seiter

Writers:

Harvey Fergusson (novel)
Josephine Lovett (writer)

Release Date:

28 October 1932 (USA)

Genre:

Drama

Tagline:

...when her cheating found her out...she sought to make marriage cover her sins! (original ad)

Plot:

Bank employee Ruth Brock has a reputation around town for being fast-and-easy but none of the panting suitors has made her yet...

Plot Keywords:

Based On Novel

Cast

Nancy Carroll	...	Ruth Brock
Cary Grant	...	Romer Sheffield
Randolph Scott	...	Bill Fadden
Edward Woods	...	Conny Billop
Lilian Bond	...	Eva Randolph
William Collier Sr.	...	Harry Brock
Jane Darwell	...	Mrs. Ida Brock
Stanley Smith	...	Joe
Rita La Roy	...	Camille
Rose Coghlan	...	Annie Brock
Oscar Apfel	...	Ed W. Randolph
Jessie Arnold	...	Aunt Minnie
Grady Sutton	...	Archie

Runtime:

73 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (Western Electric Noiseless Recording)

Filming Locations:

Lake Arrowhead, San Bernardino National Forest, California, USA

Company:

Paramount Pictures

Trivia:

One of over 700 Paramount Productions, filmed between 1929 and 1949, which were sold to MCA/Universal in 1958 for television distribution, and have been owned and controlled by Universal ever since.

Goofs:

Continuity: When Ruth takes off her shoes at Romer's house, they're are covered with mud. But when he hands them to her in the car a moment later, they're mud-free and highly polished.

Quotes:

Ruth Brock: What do you expect for a boat ride? Marlene Dietrich?

Soundtrack:

Isn't It Romantic

Fast-forward to the underpants.

The male leads in 'Hot Saturday' are Cary Grant and Randolph Scott, who -- in real life -- were house mates at about the time this movie was made. Some people have publicly speculated that Grant and Scott had a sexual relationship. I'll comment that there's very little real evidence for this. I saw 'Hot Saturday' at the Film Forum in NYC, and several people in the audience made nudge-wink noises when Scott's character shyly admitted that he's not very comfortable with women. Scott plays a geologist who's holed up in a cave, and he seems to be interested only in catacombs and stalagmites ... not catamites.

'Hot Saturday' is one of those stories (like 'A Village Tale', or the much better known 'Peyton Place') about a small town where everybody knows about everybody else's dirty linen. There are plenty of rumours in this movie, starting with Cary Grant ... who plays a character cried Romer, but everyone pronounces it 'rumour' as if he were the novelist Rumer Godden. Grant makes his entrance in a dazzling all-white outfit with white buck shoes, topped off by a black trilby. Later, Grant plays a scene in white jodhpurs that would have looked quite fetching on one of the FEMALE characters. The town is called Marysville, for some reason.

I found most of this movie quite boring. Good-girl Ruth (Nancy Carroll) is a friend of rock-hopper Scott but she dallies with playboy Grant. Then she's suddenly eager to marry Scott. He glances in the direction of her midriff and suspects that Grant did something to make her anxious to get married in a hurry. Do the maths. Carroll's father, played by William Collier, is named Harry Brock: the same name as the villain in 'Born Yesterday'.

The only scenes in this pre-Code movie that didn't bore me were three very kinky bits. Ruth accuses her kid sister Annie (the very sexy Rose Coghlan) of stealing her knickers. When Annie denies this, Ruth wrestles Annie onto the bed, hoists up Annie's skirt and yanks the underpants off Annie's body. This sequence is amazing! In a later sequence, Ruth wears a very fetching pair of gauntlet cuffs. Later still, she arrives at Randolph Scott's cave soaking wet from a rainstorm and straight away passes out. When she wakens under a blanket, the first things she sees are her own clothes -- including her bra and knickers -- strung out to dry. I guess that Randolph Scott likes girls after all.

The only interesting parts of this movie were those three kinky bits, and very few people are turned on by gauntlet cuffs ... so that leaves just two kinks, and I'm rating this snore-fest 2 out of 10.