Happiness Ahead

Not only did Dick Powell get a hit film from Warner Brothers with Happiness Ahead, but he got a radio theme song as long as he was concentrating on musicals.

Breaking tradition somewhat, the film opens with Powell singing the title song Happiness Ahead. For the next several years until Powell was doing the dramatic parts he wanted, the song Happiness Ahead served as his theme song in the same way that Where The Blue Of The Night was Bing Crosby's theme. But the film didn't end here.

Happiness Ahead is a typical Depression Era film with either a poor shop girl falling for some young millionaire playboy or in this case the other way around. Josephine Hutchinson plays the young débutante who is bored to tears with her society peers and goes out with maid Ruth Donnelly and chauffeur Allen Jenkins one night. At a night club she meets Dick Powell who charms her with a couple of other songs Beauty Must Be Loved and Pop Goes Your Heart.

He's a dispatcher for a window washing company and looking to form a company of his own with pal Frank McHugh. Powell doesn't know about Josephine's big bucks and she wants to keep it that way for the moment, but maybe help him on the sly.

Of course this leads to all kinds of complications, business and romantic, but in true Hollywood style it all gets resolved in the end.

One role I found especially interesting is that of Russell Hicks who plays a grafting politician who has the necessary contacts to get Powell the jobs he needs. We pay him off first before anything else happens. It was an extremely true and insightful role coming from a film that the workingman's studio of Warner Brothers made.

John Halliday also has a good part as Hutchinson's father. He made it the hard way himself and secretly appreciates what Josephine wants in a man.

So if you like Dick Powell the singer as well as Dick Powell the hardboiled noir star, Happiness Ahead will make you very happy indeed.

This is one of those films so popular in the 1930's in which a rich person, either intentionally or through coincidence, is mistaken for a person of modest means. As a result of this, the rich person ends up falling in love with a person of actual modest means.

In this case Joan Bradford (Josephine Hutchinson) is a wealthy heiress who is expected to marry a wealthy heir in a manner that resembles a corporate merger more than a romance. On the night that the engagement is to be announced she escapes her parents' mansion and begins walking along the streets of New York City. She goes into a night spot where she meets a group of young people, one of whom is window washing dispatcher Bob Lane (Dick Powell). Bob offers Joan a ride home at the evening's end, and she accepts. She doesn't want Bob to know she is wealthy, so she picks a random boarding house and tells him to drop her off.

Now the problems of the deception begin. Joan has given Bob a fake name - Joan Smith - and Bob is expecting to pick her up for a date in a few days at an address where she does not live. So Joan rents a place there and furnishes it, only showing up on Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays right before her dates with Bob, and going back to her real home after he drops her off. She manages to fend off her mother's questions with the help of her sympathetic father (Jack Halliday). However, Joan soon finds she is in love with Bob, and with him talking about the two of them having a future together, she must face how to let him know who she really is without him feel betrayed.

This film is a bit of a departure for Dick Powell's musical films. He is not playing someone with musical abilities who is itching to be discovered. There are no big musical numbers in the film, just Powell singing a few catchy songs. This is a very fun film if you like the Warner Brothers musical comedies from the 1930's.

In every episode of Three's Company, someone tells a fib, it snowballs into bigger problems, and it's all finally resolved in the end. There's the plot of Happiness Ahead, from First National. Rich girl Joan (Jo Hutchinson) doesn't want to marry her assigned boyfriend, so she goes to great lengths to chase blue collar worker "Bob" (Dick Powell) who opens the film by singing "Happiness Ahead". The nasal Allen Jenkins is in here as the butler... we usually see him playing the wisecracking gangsters. Frank McHugh is in here as Tom, for comedy relief. And Jane Darwell (Ma Joad !) is the landlady that clues Bob in to what's going on. Cute little film. Fun little love story. Nothing that will tax the brain... I could have done with less singing numbers, but that's what everyone was doing in those days. Directed by Mervyn LeRoy, who was six when the big quake hit san francisco. Quite an interesting tale.

Dick Powell and Josephine Hutchinson star in "Happiness Ahead," a 1934 film featuring John Halliday, Allan Jenkins, Frank McHugh, and directed by Mervyn LeRoy.

This is a typical class system comedy, common in the 1930s, in which a rich girl, Joan Bradford (Hutchinson) poses as a poor one and meets a window washer, Bob Lane (Powell). The usual complications arise.

This film is a cut above, thanks to the beautiful singing of Dick Powell, as well as his boyish charm. Powell became success as a serious actor and producer, so my generation was not familiar with his early persona. He's marvelous, and overall, he was so multi-talented, he's probably underrated today.

Frank McHugh gives a lively performance as Bob's best friend.

What I loved about this movie were some of the prices given -- a New Year's Eve Chinese dinner for four, plus floor show, was $12.00 and was considered "the damage." It took three years for Bob to raise $700; and to start his own business would be $2000. There was also a shot of a suitcase -- everyone had this particular suitcase, beige with brown and white stripes down the middle.

Very enjoyable.

HAPPINESS AHEAD (First National, 1934), directed by Mervyn LeRoy, is one of the many 1930s Hollywood comedies dealing with "rich girl falling in love with common man" theme, a cliché' made famous with Columbia's Academy Award winning, IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT featuring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. In this instance, "It Happened New Year's Eve" being the basic theme.

The setting: New York. Time: New Year's Eve. The plot: Joan Bradford (Josephine Hutchinson, the central character to the story) is a lonely rich girl who prefers to mingle with the common people instead of her parent's rich but boring socialites. Granted permission by her understanding father (John Halliday), she walks about the city streets surrounded by happy-go-lucky people waiting for that big stroke of midnight. She comes into a Chinese night club where she sits alone. In the table next to her is Bob Lane (Dick Powell), a window washer, accompanied by his friends (Frank McHugh, Dorothy Dare and others). When the lights go out at the stroke of midnight, the lights come back on and Bob is seen mistakenly kissing Joan. Feeling sorry for the girl because she is alone, Bob invites her to his table. This becomes the beginning of a beautiful friendship, but Joan hides the fact of who she really is, pretending to be an unemployed girl living in a tenement apartment under the surname of Smith.

Also featured in the cast are Allen Jenkins and Ruth Donnelly as the Bradford chauffeur and maid; Marjorie Gateson as Joan's mother; Gavin Gordon as Joan's stuffy suitor; and Jane Darwell as the nosy landlady. HAPPINESS AHEAD relies more on plot than songs, but there's enough to go around, including the title tune sung by Powell prior to the opening credits as he's presented transposed through the clouds; "Pop Goes Your Heart," "All on Account of Strawberry Sundae" (sung by Dorothy Dare and Powell); "Beauty Must Be Loved" and "Massaging Window Panes" (sung by Powell and McHugh as they wash windows)

In 1938, Powell starred in another "rich girl/common man" story for Warner Brothers titled HARD TO GET with Olivia De Havilland as the heiress and Powell as a gas station attendant. Hutchinson's performance from this earlier film is more refined while the refine DeHavilland herself in HARD TO GET is more madcap and spoiled, making that story more amusing and fun. Both films, similar in theme, are quite enjoyable in spite their lack of production numbers famous in Warners musicals during that time.

HAPPINESS AHEAD would be reworked again by Warner Brothers as HERE COMES HAPPINESS (1941), a "B" comedy featuring Edward Norris and Mildred Coles (including the "Happiness Ahead" theme song), and as LOVE AND LEARN (1947) with Jack Carson and Martha Vickers. All three versions can be seen from time to time on cable TV's Turner Classic Movies. As Powell would say throughout the movie, "Well, that's taken care of." It certainly is. (***)