One More Spring

Warner Baxter's auction house has failed, and all he has left is Napoleon's bed. Walter Woolf King is a concert violist, down to his fiddle and a coat with a fur collar. Janet Gaynor is an orphan with even less. At the start of a cold New York winter, they find themselves living in a stable in Central Park, hoping they can hang on until spring.

Henry King's wonderful movie about kindness and hope has undeservedly vanished from consciousness; Fox Film was falling to pieces until it was rescued and merged with Darryl Zanuck's 20th Century Productions. It was still a major studio, with the resources to produce this sentimental masterpiece, with a perfect cast. Walter Woolf King, usually a villain, is oddly sympathetic as the irascible musician. The rest of the roles are wonderfully played: Grant Withers as a banker despairing as his bank goes under; Roger Imhof and Jane Darwell as the couple who helps them out; even Stepin Fetchit provides some decent comedy relief as a zookeeper from whom they steal his lions' meat.

This movie never reaches the levels of zaniness that the following year's MY MAN GODFREY would achieve; its softer nature offers a message of human decency that its more famous fellow eschews. Its success as a movie, if not commercially, is just as great.

"One More Spring" is a delicate, sensitive drama about three lost souls trying to survive during the Depression: two men and a woman, all jobless and homeless, who set up housekeeping together in the maintenance shed in Central Park. The woman is played by Janet Gaynor, a popular ingenue of the early 1930s who usually played virginal good-girl roles. In "One More Spring", she lives in a one-room shack with two men (literally "shacking up" with them), and it's very much to Gaynor's credit as an actress that she manages to convince us there's no hanky-panky going on. She's living in a shack with two men, simply because things are desperate and her only alternative is to live in the streets. Her two shackmates are well-played by Warner Baxter and Walter Woolf King. (King, who usually played villainous roles, is remarkably sympathetic here.)

"One More Spring" gives one of the most realistic depictions of the Depression that I've ever seen. Many people in Depression-era America believed that the stock-market crash was entirely caused by corporate millionaires. Here, the upper class is represented by Mr. Sheridan, who has lost nearly all of his wealth in the crash that has ruined so many. He must deal with the fact that the failure of his own company has also caused the ruin of so many hundreds of his working-class employees. Grant Mitchell gives an excellent performance in what could have been a stereotyped role. At one point - disgraced and ruined - Mitchell pauses on a bridge over the lake in Central Park. He steps onto the bridge's parapet, leans over towards the water, pauses again as he considers ending it all ... the look on Mitchell's face during this scene is unforgettable.

"One More Spring" is well-directed by Henry King, one of the two most under-rated directors of Hollywood's golden era. (The other being Sam Wood.) The only sour note in "One More Spring" is a brief appearance by Stepin Fetchit, doing his usual "I'se comin', boss" routine. Fetchit was very popular in the 1930s, and he was probably written into this film as "insurance" to help make "One More Spring" more successful at the box-office. This delicately beautiful film would work better if Stepin Fetchit's scenes - entirely irrelevant to the plot - were deleted.

A film like One More Spring is set firmly in the Depression era 30s and could never be remade again. It's also as a nice, possibly incredibly saccharine view of the human spirit. Even in the 30s I'm not sure people were as nice as they are here.

Of course for a nice picture you need a nice girl and Janet Gaynor was always a nice girl in every film. Broke, unemployed, and starving she gets taken in by a kind pair of men and she agrees with Warner Baxter and Walter Woolf King that there will be no hanky panky. As there was a Code in place now, there was none.

Both Baxter and King are already charity cases. They are living in a shed in Central Park where one of the groundskeepers Roger Imhoff keeps his equipment. I'm not sure but even in the 30s Imhoff letting these two live there might not have gotten Imhoff canned. But the agreed upon price is for unemployed violinist King to teach Imhoff how to play Mother Machree on the fiddle. Of course if he had an ear for music or any talent whatever in that direction it would help. But Imhoff is determined to serenade his missus Jane Darwell with Mother Machree come what may,

Bank president Grant Mitchell after the bank failure of 1933 also comes to live with them. He's rich with some sense of social responsibility, he loses his own fortune to keep his bank from going under.

Fans of Gaynor and Baxter ought to love this film. And if there was ever a film that applauded the New Deal especially it's banking provisions One More Spring is it.

... and try to deal with the Great Depression with only their wits to serve them. What do they have in common? In a society that has shed all cultural extras as nonessentials, suddenly they have no profession.

Jaret Otkar (Warner Baxter) has a bankrupt antique shop and everything is auctioned off but Napoleon's bed which the auctioneer can't even get a quarter for, so he lets Jaret keep it. A starving violinist, Martin Rosenberg (Walter Woolf King) comes into the shop after the auction, Jaret feeds him, and the two decide to team up for survival. Now Jaret is realistic and stoic towards almost everything that happens to him except this one thing - he decides to wheel the bed into Central Park and sleep there. The next morning a cop tells the two to move along. The two encounter a kindly maintenance man, Mr. Sweeney (Roger Imhof) who lets them store their bed in his toolshed and sleep there in return for violin lessons from Rosenberg, who is less than enthusiastic about the prospect. Later the two encounter homeless actress Elizabeth Cheney (Janet Gaynor) and now the team is a threesome.

Cheney acts as the housekeeper for the three, Rosenberg keeps a roof over their heads with his violin lessons, and Otkar is a businessman, so he is central to them not starving. He comes up with schemes that include distracting a Central Park Zoo caretaker so he can steal some of the meat intended for the lions. Helping them out is the maintenance man that got them the shed in the first place, with some occasional bread and tea and blankets.

Sweeney and his wife are lucky. They both have unskilled but necessary jobs, so their modest but steady living probably shoves them into the middle class. But then their bank fails. And now all are just trying to get through the winter to the titular "one more spring".

So the trio not only has the challenge of survival, two of them have to deal with a fellow that doesn't seem to understand the peril of his own situation - Rosenberg. He is very rude to people who are in a position to help him, thinks he is too good to play his violin for passers by, and is just disagreeable in general. I'm not sure why he is made so obnoxious except maybe this was to contrast with the rather sweet and generous personalities of the other characters.

Warner Brothers is mainly known as the studio that spent the most time on the Great Depression with all of their films about gangsters, people who turn to crime out of necessity, and even Broadway shows with the backdrop of the Great Depression. But this little entry from Fox takes a completely different tack on those hard times and it is different from anything else of its genre I've seen and is definitely worth your time.

Victims of the depression cope with the day-to-day challenges of finding warmth and shelter. A clear-eyed view of the depression which manages to be warm-hearted without growing too sentimental. Janet Gaynor and the under-appreciated Warner Baxter make a likeable couple (even though they're not an actual couple for most of the movie), while Walter Woolf King provides enjoyably spiky comic relief. The hardship suffered by the characters is inevitably sanitised for a '30s audience - although it's difficult to see how that many of them would have wanted to watch a reflection of their own life experiences at a time when Hollywood was all about escapism. Deserves to be a classic but is unjustly forgotten.