Beg, Borrow or Steal

Con man Frank Morgan finds out his wife and daughter are coming to the Riviera to introduce his future in-laws to him. He scrambles to put up a front, and it falls into his lap when Count John Beal lends him his chateau, and his fellow con-men pass themselves off as nobility.

I blinked a couple of times and realized this was an MGM version of LADY FOR A DAY, with lots of MGM gloss. With a cast that includes Herman Bing, Erik Rhodes, E.E. Clive, Reginald Denny, and Vladimir Sokoloff, it's a lot of fun, even if director William Thiele can't tread the line between pathos and peribathos as nimbly as Frank Capra.

Thiele was a fine director; his DREI VON DER TANKSTELLE was the biggest hit in Germany in 1930. However, in 1933, he had to flee Germany because he was Jewish. His visuals in this movie are fine, but his direction of the performers depends largely on the script and the actors; I suspect Thiele let these professionals have their heads. He continued to write and direct B movies and television through the middle of the 1950s, returned to Germany to direct two more movies in 1960. He died in 1975, aged 85.