Brilliant Marriage

Madge is a lovely young lady who comes from a good family. And, she has a loving boyfriend who wants to marry her. However, her life crashes down around her when an evil jerk arrives to blackmail the family. It seems that Madge's parents are not her biological ones...and her birth mother is in prison for murder!!! This cellmate of her mother agrees to be quiet...for a price! But the damage has been done to Madge emotionally. Plus, when the story later makes the newspapers despite the bribe being paid, now her future mother-in-law indicates that she won't approve of the marriage. What is she to do...stay and fight for her man or give up and accept the proposal of a strange reporter?

I liked this movie because the ending was so very sweet. Much of it was because of the wonderful supporting characters on the freighter. Freighter? Well, you'll just have to see the film yourself...and see that B-movies are not necessarily bad movies at all.

Park Avenue deb Joan Marsh is almost ready to marry Hugh Marlowe in his screen debut, when she discovers she is adopted; her mother is in prison for life in France as accessory to murder of her father. She brilliantly reacts to this by spending a lot of time in Greenwich Village, where they make bad rum punch, and where she meets newspaperman Ray Walker, a sort of cut-rate Clark Gable from It HAPPENED ONE NIGHT. Since she figures she's not fit for decent society, she decides to marry him and go off to the South Seas with him. However, his jilted girlfriend, newspaperwoman Inez Courtney, is present to stir the plot whenever it looks like this will happen.

Once you get past the idiotic premise, it's a decent and efficiently run Poverty Row effort directed by Phil Rosen. He had ascended from the ranks of cameramen to director and was making a name for himself when sound came along and knocked him back into the Bs and although his sound output was never distinguished, he worked steadily through the end of the 1940s, just shortly before his death. This was just one of nine movies he directed in 1936!

I love sweet, silly 1930s movies and 1930s "pre-Code" flicks that aren't so sweet. This one, though, pretends it's a romance, then ignores the fact that the second female lead engages in unethical, criminally fraudulent, and just plain cruel conduct-twice! Other characters have weird personality traits, too, like being extremely fickle, but those could be overlooked. However, when someone engages in conduct that would make them a "bad guy" in any movie (even in our jaded age), but it's somehow excused because she really loves her man, suspension of disbelief goes out the window.