Sudden Money

Everyone eats in the Patterson home, but money is always a little tight. So when brother-in-law Broderick Crawford asks Charley Ruggles to come in with him on a sweepstake ticket, Ruggles has to struggle to come up with $1.50. When they win, however, he collects $90,000, and the household is turned upside down. Crawford puts his $60,000 into operating his horse-racing system, Ruggles revives his old college jazz band, wife Marjorie Rambeau revives her painting career, daughter Evelyn Keyes goes to a finishing school where she can be introduced to rich boys, son Billy Lee gets sent to military school, and grandfather Charley Grapewin.... well, he just looks on in amused bemusement. Meanwhile, the audience watches the money vanish.

It's a pleasant programmer directed by Nick Grinde, who had been grinding them out since 1928, sometimes A Pictures for MGM, sometimes for Gower Gulch producers. By the time he hung up the megaphone in 1945 he had helmed 65 decent but mostly unexceptional pictures, and this is one of them. He died in 1979 at the age of 86.