$10 Raise

Hubert Wilkins (Horton) is a creature of habit. The film takes about the first ten minutes to point that out as his morning routine on the way to work is shown working out just as a diner employee says it will. Hubert has been working as a bookkeeper at Bates Importing and Exporting for eighteen years, but makes only forty dollars a week. In a time with no real inflation, he can live on this just fine. But he wants to marry the firm's secretary, Emily (Karen Morley), and he will need a ten dollar raise to do that.

But Hubert lets people walk all over him. A salesman who comes by the company has borrowed four hundred dollars from him and never pays him back. When Hubert finally gets the nerve to ask his boss, the irascible Mr. Bates (Berton Churchill), for a raise, Bates says that he should be glad he gets 40 dollars a week, because he is worth only thirty dollars a week, and then throws him out of the office. Bates always talks to Hubert in the most disrespectful tone. In a secondary plot, Mr. Bates' son on wants to marry Emily's sister, but his father wants his son to concentrate on his career and the firm instead. Are Hubert and Emily destined to grow old together yet apart because of Hubert's lack of a spine? Watch and find out.

Some people think that a little of Edward Everett Horton's continually befuddled act goes a long way but more than that goes too far. I just don't happen to be one of those people. I would have never thought that Horton and Karen Morley would be believable as a couple since she is 23 years younger than him, but it works. Since Bates is the last name of Horton's comic foil and valet in "Top Hat", I wondered if that was why the boss was named Bates in this film. But it turns out this film is the remake of a silent era film and the boss was named Bates in the original.

I would recommend this one as a light and breezy way to spend an hour, in spite of some of the rather serious sounding themes, but how much you like it will ultimately depend upon how you feel about Edward Everett Horton's comic appeal.