Tango

Marian Nixon is looking for a job. Chick Chandler wangles her one as a model for Herman Bing's stockings. The agency's managing partner, George Meeker tries his moves on her, but it's his brother, Matty Kemp, she falls for. They get married, but Kemp's snooty mother and Meeker insist on an annulment.

Miss Nixon's role at the center of this hullabaloo is to remain sweet-tempered, moral and accept whatever is thrown at her. It's pretty annoying. Meanwhile, there are some underutilized actors like Marie Prevost as Miss Nixon's room mate and Warren Hymer as a taxi driver, who is is not annoying for once. Quite clearly, there was a lot in Vida Hurst's novel that was left out of the movie. That is, of course, inevitable. What is bad is that the movie as it exists makes the point so plainly.

Miss Nixon and Miss Prevost were in their last year of making movies. Marie would die early the next year, of malnutrition (she was supposedly trying to lose weight) and alcoholism. Miss Nixon's movie career would end, but she would live for for another 37 years, dying in 1983 at the age of 78, having outlived her third and fourth husbands, director William Seiter and actor Ben Lyon.