Repent at Leisure

This is a variation on the runaway bride plot. Wendy Barrie, generally not a favorite of mine, is likable as said lady. She runs out on her would-be groom as the movie is opening. Her goal is to meet a man not interested in her department store-owner father's money. Enter Kent Taylor.

Taylor is rather wooden. But his character is meant to be stolid, though honorable. They make a cute couple, through ups and downs.

The supporting cast is uniformly good. And the plot doesn't seem forced. It has plenty of variations on the standard theme and is a nice way to pass some time.

Wendy Barrie and Kent Taylor star in "Repent at Leisure" from 1941.

Barrie plays Emily Baldwin, the daughter of a department store magnet who is about to marry a prince and runs out on him. She hops on a bus and meets a man, Richard Hughes (Kent Taylor) who gives her a dime for the bus. Naturally he's curious as to what she's doing in a wedding gown. She tells him she was a model at a store and quit abruptly.

She is interested in meeting a different kind of man from what she has in the past, and he's it; they also have similar goals. She has nowhere to go so he offers her a separate part of his apartment.

It turns out he works at her father's department store - she doesn't mention it's owned by her family - and the next day, all the single men are fired. They have to cut employees and they don't want children to suffer. Try pulling something like that today.

Richard says he's married and has been for the past year. His boss then invites Richard and his wife over to play bridge.

Emily offers to be his wife for the evening. They not only wind up getting married for real, but they go to a foundling home and adopt a beautiful baby boy. All goes well for a while.

This is a good film with a nice performance by Wendy Barrie and the rest of the cast. Charles Lane, who died at 102 in 2007, is Richard's curmudgeon boss and gives his usual nasty performance; and George Barbier is Emily's kind and helpful father.

Enjoyable.

Though this is hardly original, I think that maybe the fact that there's a consistent grade of B-listers taking part just about gets it over the finish line in one piece. With "Emily" (Wendy Barrie) jilting "Prince Paul" (Rafael Storm) at the altar - with the full support of her doting and wealthy father "Baldwin" (George Barbier), she bumps into the charming "Hughes" (Kent Taylor) on the top of a bus - in full wedding regalia - and the ensuing whirlwind romance results in marriage. She tells her father only to discover that he is one of his employees. Much to the chagrin of his colleagues, "Hughes" suddenly starts to move up through the department store in which he works, but he is confident it's all based on merit. He has no idea that he's the boss's son-in-law! That state of affairs cannot continue and in fit of pique, the man leaves job and marriage to work for a competitor. The battles lines are drawn as the two stores battle to out-sale each other. It's all about brollies in the end as the rather predicable outcome hoves into view. The cast put a little entertaining effort into their characters and the writing does enough to keep this moving along making an amiable watch for an hour.

Thanks largely to the insouciant script by Jerome Cady, the well-done comic direction by Frank Woodruff (who'd scored at the same studio a year before with the similarly themed "Cross-Country Romance") and the charm of Wendy Barrie in the female lead, this is a better-than-average "B" with some genuinely imaginative moments. It's basically an "It Happened One Night" knockoff, but with variations that give it a unique appeal. Kent Taylor's queeny performance as the young store clerk obsessed with "success" books (including those Harold Lloyd/Clark Kent glasses!) is a bit odd but has its own charm; George Barbier is for once subtle and genuinely moving as Barrie's father (a department-store owner who helps his daughter escape a mismatched marriage to a stuck-up fortune-hunting prince, well played by Rafael Storm), the plot has some quite unexpected twists (courtesy of writers who obviously didn't take this assignment overly seriously), and only the racist so-called "comedy" of Fred "Snowflake" Toones mars it.

At only 66 minutes, we knew this wasn't going to be a major work from RKO. Wendy Barrie stars as "Emily", about to be married to the Prince of something or other. But she's not happy, and laments that she doesn't really want to marry him anyway. She bumps into "Richard" (Kent Taylor), and they hit it off. Just one problem: Richard works in her own father's store ! Wendy Barrie starred in a bunch of the "Falcon" films as well as the "Saint" films. Kent Taylor did okay in hollywood, but looks like he never made the bigtime. and of course, Charles Lane is "Morgan", the manager; Lane played a HUGE number of bit parts over his LONG career, usually serious, somber roles, (bill collectors) who had to rain on someone's parade. So when the story has them telling lie after lie to Morgan to save their jobs, they get in deeper and deeper. It's all pretty silly. If you're old enough to know Three's Company, this is where Mr. Roper walks in and it all blows up! as usual, they could have avoided the whole thing if they had just told the truth. We rush through the whole story... it's okay, as a B movie. all over and done with pretty quickly. hard to buy into it all, since it's all built on un-necessary lies and mis-understandings. we were way into the hollywood film code by now, but a smidge prior to entering WWII. shows on Turner Classics. meh.