Park Avenue deb Joan Marsh is almost ready to marry Hugh Marlowe in his screen debut, when she discovers she is adopted; her mother is in prison for life in France as accessory to murder of her father. She brilliantly reacts to this by spending a lot of time in Greenwich Village, where they make bad rum punch, and where she meets newspaperman Ray Walker, a sort of cut-rate Clark Gable from It HAPPENED ONE NIGHT. Since she figures she's not fit for decent society, she decides to marry him and go off to the South Seas with him. However, his jilted girlfriend, newspaperwoman Inez Courtney, is present to stir the plot whenever it looks like this will happen.
Once you get past the idiotic premise, it's a decent and efficiently run Poverty Row effort directed by Phil Rosen. He had ascended from the ranks of cameramen to director and was making a name for himself when sound came along and knocked him back into the Bs and although his sound output was never distinguished, he worked steadily through the end of the 1940s, just shortly before his death. This was just one of nine movies he directed in 1936!
Once you get past the idiotic premise, it's a decent and efficiently run Poverty Row effort directed by Phil Rosen. He had ascended from the ranks of cameramen to director and was making a name for himself when sound came along and knocked him back into the Bs and although his sound output was never distinguished, he worked steadily through the end of the 1940s, just shortly before his death. This was just one of nine movies he directed in 1936!
