Then more dying single millionaires without heirs will be finding complete strangers to give their money to. We got this in 1932 with "If I had a Million", and there have been variations of that theme for years. Here, it's the apparently dying Cecil Kellaway who what's the name out of the phone book and has his attorney Ernest Truex walk up to Joyce Reynolds and hand her the check, no strings attached.
But then he finds out that he is not going to die and decides to get the money back, moving into the boarding house where Reynolds and her husband Robert Hutton live. With Reynolds holding the purse strings and Hutton a struggling writer, it soon becomes a national case of interest when Reynolds and Hutton file for divorce. Other marriages break up over arguments of the case, and public opinion from the male perspective indicates that the wife should share for money just like a husband would be expected to do in a divorce case.
This gives a nice little gender twist, and it's one of the few times that equal rights have been dealt with especially from that perspective. The film is loaded with cameos by Warner brother contract players who appear either on screen as a part of movie scenes (filmed exclusively for this movie) and fantasies in movie fan Reynolds' mind. Kellaway is playing a character that Sydney Greenstreet would also have been perfect for. In fact I remember another Warner Brothers movie from 1947, "That Way With Women", that dealt with a similar theme where a man (Dane Clark) was the recipient of money from a person he didn't know.
So you get Jack Carson, Janis Paige, Humphrey Bogart, Eleanor Parker and Alexis Smith in on-screen cameos, and it's interesting to see Bogart (then the king of Warner Brothers) agreeing to do such a role. This works out being better simply because the writers really took this beyond the type of romantic screwball comedy that had been done for years, and while it is certainly unique, it would have been better had they dealt with the gender issues before the last reel.
But then he finds out that he is not going to die and decides to get the money back, moving into the boarding house where Reynolds and her husband Robert Hutton live. With Reynolds holding the purse strings and Hutton a struggling writer, it soon becomes a national case of interest when Reynolds and Hutton file for divorce. Other marriages break up over arguments of the case, and public opinion from the male perspective indicates that the wife should share for money just like a husband would be expected to do in a divorce case.
This gives a nice little gender twist, and it's one of the few times that equal rights have been dealt with especially from that perspective. The film is loaded with cameos by Warner brother contract players who appear either on screen as a part of movie scenes (filmed exclusively for this movie) and fantasies in movie fan Reynolds' mind. Kellaway is playing a character that Sydney Greenstreet would also have been perfect for. In fact I remember another Warner Brothers movie from 1947, "That Way With Women", that dealt with a similar theme where a man (Dane Clark) was the recipient of money from a person he didn't know.
So you get Jack Carson, Janis Paige, Humphrey Bogart, Eleanor Parker and Alexis Smith in on-screen cameos, and it's interesting to see Bogart (then the king of Warner Brothers) agreeing to do such a role. This works out being better simply because the writers really took this beyond the type of romantic screwball comedy that had been done for years, and while it is certainly unique, it would have been better had they dealt with the gender issues before the last reel.