Money Talks

Julian Rose's business has failed, and his friend has given him five hundred pounds for the good will. He moves with his daughter, Judy Kelly, into a boarding house where all the tenants - and the landlady - try to get him to 'invest' in their money-making schemes. Then lawyers tell him that his aunt has died and left him a hundred thousand, providing he have no more than fifty pounds at the end of the month.

Yes, it's a cut-rate BREWSTER'S MILLIONS, topped off with two boxers who want to marry Miss Kelly.

There's lots of bad acting and bad jokes in this one. Also, for writer-director Norman Lee, who had written for Hitchcock (his co-writer, Edwin Greenwood, would also contribute to two of Hitchcock's scripts), it's so old and decrepit, it stinks.

Yet there are moments, through the movie, when Rose throws in an ad lib, and you can see a glimmer of what they were trying to do with this movie.\: make a cheap ABIE'S IRISH ROSE, sure, but it becomes clear that Rose, while no actor - a distressingly large number of people with speaking roles in this one aren't - he was what we called on the American vaudeville circuit, a monologist, someone who could assume a character, act within that character, and tell an amusing story, like Will Rogers or Fred Allen. It all comes together during the wedding that ends the movie, when he gives a toast to his movie daughter and her movie husband. Then I could hear the echoes of now long dead relatives and their self-deprecatory and loving humor.

It doesn't save the movie. It still stinks. Too bad.