One More Spring

Warner Baxter's auction house has failed, and all he has left is Napoleon's bed. Walter Woolf King is a concert violist, down to his fiddle and a coat with a fur collar. Janet Gaynor is an orphan with even less. At the start of a cold New York winter, they find themselves living in a stable in Central Park, hoping they can hang on until spring.

This wonderful movie about kindness and hope from Henry King has undeservedly vanished from consciousness; Fox Film was falling to pieces until it was rescued and merged with Darryl Zanuck's 20th Century Productions. It was still a major studio, with the resources to produce this sentimental masterpiece, with a perfect cast. Walter Woolf King, usually a villain, is oddly sympathetic as the irascible musician. The rest of the roles are wonderfully played: Grant Withers as a banker despairing as his bank goes under; Roger Imhof and Jane Darwell as the couple who helps them out; even Stepin Fetchit provides some decent comedy relief as a zookeeper from whom they steal his lions' meat.

This movie never reaches the levels of zaniness that the following year's MY MAN GODFREY would achieve; its softer nature offers a message of human decency that its more famous fellow eschews. Its success as a movie, if not commercially, is just as great.