Hearing about her in connection to auteur James Whale's work,I was intrigued to find that a DVD seller had recently tracked down a rare Rom-Com with Gloria Stuart.With the flick running for just over an hour,I decided to find out if it is love.The plot:Being in love with Rims O'Neil, Bobby Halevy is disappointed to find O'Neil is playing hard to get.Deciding to take matters into her own hands,Halevy pretends to be interested in Adolph Jr.,which leads to O'Neil revealing his true feelings and them getting married! As married life sinks in,O'Neil and Halevy begin to experience financial hardships.View on the film:Rolling out Maxwell Anderson's 1927 play,the screenplay by Jerry Wald/Harry Sauber & Lawrence Hazard is interestingly caught between being of the time and also being surprisingly modern,as Mr. Halevy listens to the wireless on "the Europe problem",which leads to him being mocked for being interested in an event taking place so far away. Vastly changing Anderson's play (from character name changes,to "updating" the setting) the writers give Bobby Halevy a terrific modern edge, highlighted in Halevy cleverly using her own income,and rather uniquely being the women who is after the man.Tragically killing himself after having to keep secret that he was gay and the suicide of his wife Aleta Freel, Ross Alexander gives a dashing performance as Rims O'Neil,whose speedy exchanges with Bobby are delivered by Alexander with a charismatic slickness. Shimmering in the playful back and fourths with Alexander,the elegant Gloria Stuart gives a delightful performance as Bobby,whose light Comedy dialogue Stuart catches with the perfect touch,which is joined by a joyful sass from Stuart displaying Bobby's independent side,as Booby and Rims start to wonder if maybe it's love.
... View More"Titanic" actress Gloria Stuart is one of the stars of "Maybe It's Love," a 1935 comedy from Warners based on the Maxwell Anderson play "Saturday's Children" and remade in 1940. Stuart was then 25 years old; big fame would elude her until 62 years later.Here, she's a secretary, Bobby, in love with Rims (Ross Alexander) who doesn't declare himself. To move things along, she pretends to be interested in another man, Adolph Jr. (Phillip Reed) to make him jealous.Bobby and Rims marry, but find the going difficult. Bobby's big family (Frank McHugh, Ruth Donnelly, Helen Lowell, and Henry Travers) always seems to be around, and they're having trouble making ends meet. The two separate.This movie has a lot of warmth and charm, but it's not exactly original. The pretty Stuart was a fresh, amiable actress. Phillip Reed at some angles looks like Tyrone Power - the hair, the hairline, the eyebrows, even the clothes, though he wasn't anywhere near as handsome. Ross Alexander, in the role played on Broadway by Humphrey Bogart, is cute with a real character face. Such a short, sad life, it was almost hard to watch him. Frank McHugh and the rest of the cast were delightful.The movie is short and was probably cut, due to what looks like an editing problem - the couple goes from being in love to breaking up -- it really seems like something was left out.See it for the cast.
... View MoreOne would never suspect that this little domestic comedy comes from the pen of Maxwell Anderson, since it's no more than a typical piece of Depression-era fluff about money and finances being the root of most domestic squabbles.Lovely GLORIA STUART (so beautiful in her prime) and ungainly ROSS Alexander (he never made it to stardom) are the leads and the supporting cast is a pleasant one filled with Warner contract players. But it's PHILLIP REED, as a rich man's playboy son, who should have had the romantic lead opposite Stuart, looking like a Tyrone Power clone, and not a bad actor at all.HENRY TRAVERS, RUTH DONNELLY, FRANK McHUGH and others are well used, with McHugh being much less obnoxious than usual in his more subdued comedy role as Donnelly's husband.It starts out briskly, with a lot of talk about "the situation in Europe" and "how Europe is making out" as part of the breakfast talk, so it seems that it's going to be a better than usual domestic tale that raises some serious issues. But before it's midway through, it gets stuck in a rut as no more than an office romance that ends in marriage but quickly falls into silly lover's spats and quarrels over finances and the inability to "live on a budget".From that midway point on, it descends into a trivial domestic comedy with pat situations complete with a cornball ending that reunites the lovers under trying circumstances.Summing up: Not worth the trouble. I note from another comment that this became a remake called "Saturday's Children" in the '40s with John Garfield, Ann Shirley and Claude Rains.Trivia note: Ross Alexander was an up and coming Warner contract player who appeared the same year in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "Captain Blood" and was being considered for bigger roles, but he committed suicide two years later over problems with his marriage and rumors of his homosexuality which the studio tried to suppress.
... View MoreMaxwell Anderson's very popular 1927 play, with 3 television productions as well as the three movies versions, has some very funny moments. The top-notch cast has Gloria Stuart, of Titanic (1996) fame, and Ross Alexander as the romantic leads in a seesaw romance. The highlight of the movie is the way Stuart gets Alexander to marry her, as coached by big sister Ruth Donnelly, who supplies cues in shorthand, and accurately predicts Alexander's responses to Stuart's actions and statements. I couldn't stop laughing at the entire sequence, even though I had seen the remake, Saturday's Children (1940). Unfortunately, the second half of the movie doesn't sustain the comedy of the first half, and degenerates into more of a drama about the difficulties in marriage. Still, the movie is a winner.
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