You have to judge this film in the context of how it was exhibited back in 1933. This hour-long film was not RKO's attempt at a main exhibit - that would have been something along the lines of that year's "Flying Down to Rio". All of the studios made short little films like this as filler for matinees - much like afternoon TV programming.
The film starts out with a young steel town couple Jim and Anna Stanley (Charles Bickford and Irene Dunne) just before they get married. Anne has big dreams of getting away from the mills, Jim is content to go along as things are. After they marry, Anna takes in boarders and saves up Jim's sizable paychecks so they can get "out of this place", although at the time she doesn't have a plan. Her chance comes when quiet and studious boarder Joe Zarcovia (Eric Linden) comes up with a chemical process for making dye from waste from the steel making process. For some reason, Anna seems to believe that her big hunk of steel-making husband is a genius at business and that he can make a fortune from this formula. Given we only have 58 minutes for our story, of course she is right. Thus the chemist and the Stanleys go into business together and soon are fabulously rich. The Stanleys have everything, including a little son. Unfortunately, in the case of Jim, you can take the man out of steel-town but you can't take the steel-town of the man. Soon he's on a spree that involves heavy drinking, another woman that for some reason insists on marriage rather than just the cushy kept-woman lifestyle she has in New York City, and then the business begins to suffer.
This film is so short that quite a few things don't make sense. For one thing, the message of the picture seems to be that the Stanleys are made for each other regardless of what happens, in spite of the fact that these two seem to be two very different people who want very different things out of life. Anna is supposed to be the epitome of a loyal woman, although considering what she's put through by her husband she seems more like a doormat by the end of the film. Then there is Jim's golden business acumen that seems to come out of nowhere - he has done manual labor his whole life and probably didn't even finish high school.
From a historical standpoint, I found one fact to be just plain ironic. In the beginning of the film, Anna is sitting on the porch of her little "company town" house telling Jim how she didn't want to be just another generation in generations of steel town wives. She talks about how if she and Jim got married all they would have to look forward to is a house supplied by the company and Jim employed by the mill doing the same thing until he retired. Although she seems to think this is all very dull, how much so many people living in these now largely abandoned steel towns today would give to have this kind of "dullness" brought back to their lives - a guarantee of a living wage throughout their adult lives with some degree of loyalty by their employer.
This one is worth your time if it comes your way - just don't expect "Gone With the Wind".
