$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.

Edward Everett Horton leads a clockwork life. Shopkeepers set their clocks by him as he walks every day to the office where he works for Berton Churchill. He and secretary Karen Morley are in love, but he does not feel he can marry her on $40 a week. Finally, he is persuaded to ask for a raise after 18 years. Churchill tells him that he can get a younger man for $30 a week. When Miss Morley's sister, Rosina Lawrence, and Churchill's son, Glen Boles, fall in love, Churchill tries to block their romance.

It's a comedy, yes, but it's a structural comedy, certainly not what would be called a funny comedy. Horton is fine as the fussy little man in this movie, a man who picks up pins on the street and is swindled into buying worthless property by Alan Dinehart under the direction of George Marshall. The cast makes it continually watchable, but it's rather painful to watch, waiting for the worm to finally turn.

My five stars for this film are for the perseverance of the cast in seeing it to the end. For, "$10 Raise" is a very slow moving film that many may soon find tedious. That's mostly in the character of Edward Everett Horton's Hubert Wilkins. Horton is a good actor and is in many fine comedies. If it were not for his exaggerated squeamishness in this film, one wouldn't even think it was a comedy. And, although billed as such, it's mostly a drama or slice of life movie about an overly timid man.

There's a little larceny in here in a former employee, Fuller, played by Alan Dinehart. The nasty-natured and pompous owner of Bates and Company, is played by Berton Churchill. Hubert has a sweetheart whom he hasn't had the nerve to ask to marry him, waiting to get a $10-dollar raise after 18 years with the company, so he could afford to marry. Karen Morely plays Emily Converse. And, Hubert has a true friend in a former employee who has been very successful in the world.

It all works out in the end - when good things often happen to people who are good. It happens here in spades, but not to the point of having Hubert change. Still, except for fans of Horton, this isn't a movie that most people would enjoy, let alone sit through

Here are the best lines in this film.

Hubert Wilkins, "Well, down the steps." Perry's Friend (Boothe Howard, uncredited), "No! Hatch!" Wilkins, "Oh, it's a chicken drink....chicken hatch." They all laugh and Perry says, "A good egg." He pats Hubert on the shoulder as everyone laughs more.

Hubert Wilkins, "I think you'll have to admit, Emily, that a man's judgment is better than a woman's intuition."