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... because I recognize his trademark wit in some of the one liners. I can also see how some material may have gotten lost in translation while adapting it to the screen.

Paul Vanderkill (John Boles) manages his family's extensive New York City real estate holdings. His aunt Sophie drops by one day and is horrified that the Loveland Dance Hall is renting out some of their real estate. Paul says he will investigate and ensure that the place is decent. You can tell this really doesn't trouble him, he just wants Aunt Sophie humored and out of the way. It turns out it is one of those "ten cents a dance" places that were common during the Great Depression.

When Paul arrives at the dance hall, he first encounters Madelaine (Nancy Carroll). He wants to ask some questions about the place. Why he doesn't go straight to the manager is unclear, except that maybe he wants a straightforward explanation and figures he's more likely to get one from one of the girls who works there, plus we'd have no story if he simply talked to management. Madelaine gets the idea that the Paul is poor. He doesn't correct her impression, and he is surprised by her generosity to someone to whom she doesn't believe has much. He buys enough dance tickets to cover the entire evening and leaves with her. At this point she begins to realize he is not poor.

It's fun watching them have difficulties with each other's speech patterns. Paul has the remains of his Dutch ancestors' accent. Madelaine has a working class New York vocabulary.

"Did you call me a witch? For a minute I thought you said something else!" And so on.

The two get to know each other and fall in love. But Paul doesn't want to get married because - reasons. It really isn't clear. He keeps talking about having "a daughter with modern ideas" and that he doesn't want any scandal to touch her. How marrying Madeleine is scandalous is either some lame excuse not to get permanently entangled or it is really insulting because deep down he considers her beneath him and THAT would be a scandal in his estimation. It is never explained. Nor do we ever get a glimpse of this modern daughter of his.

So what happens when two people live together in 1933 when there is no birth control? I imagine you can figure out what happens. How both people handle the situation - watch and find out.

Preston Sturges was never one to humor illusions about noble poverty. Madelaine's family is what you'd expect of a group of people who are weighed down by a lifetime of poverty and the more severe and recent Depression. Mom is coarse, untrusting, and definitely not nurturing. Dad is probably dead but unmentioned - maybe he ran off. Her brother is a layabout and a moocher. Her younger sister has just one scene where she cries.

And there are characters who wander in and out of the film. I've mentioned Madelaine's family - they disappear during the second half never to be seen again. Instead, up pops Maddy's Aunt Minnie (Jessie Ralph) who is everything Maddie's mother is not - supportive, nurturing, and generous. Wherever did she come from? It is never explained.

It would be nice to have more information on the source material, because there are holes in the plot and in the cast that might be explained in Preston Sturges' play. I'd recommend this because John Boles is a much better actor than his early talkie song bird reputation would have you believe, and Nancy Carroll always grabs my attention. Her career would have gone on much longer had she not been so hard to get along with on the set. She did, though, have a very successful stage career and then made numerous guest appearances on TV as well.

Here's an interesting old movie, one of the earliest examples of a formula that would later define a whole genre, more a whole industry. Man meets girl and immediately falls in love. There is an event followed by a misunderstanding that send them apart. They rejoin at the end. Later this ending would require a public avowal, something missing here.

This is also an example of somethings that did not stick. Deep in the depression, many movies featured the ultra rich - people who just seemed to have money for no reason. Because this was before comical prudery changed films starting with the Code, we have the situation that guy knocks up the girl.

But I found it interesting for yet another reason. Movies from this era were far more willing to question gender roles than now is the case. Oh, today we worry about professions and opportunity. I'm talking about what it means to be a woman or man. In this film, we have our girl, with appealing innocence. She is the child of Manhattan, with clear immigrant, lower class heritage. Both she and the rich guy are noble people, but she far more. The film is about her decisions.

Sturges has taken the time to introduce four older women. They are shoehorned in and have nothing at all to do with the story; they are there only to show strong women, sometimes frustrated strength. There is the older woman at the dance hall where our girl works, who is much loved as she takes care of her girls. We have the aunt of our rich guy who is shown as a forceful nut job.

Then we have the girl's mother. We learn a lot about her past and values. She turns her daughter out on the street when she gets pregnant by her then boyfriend. This woman slaps her adult kids, hard. We spend the final third of the movie with the girl's aunt, something of a world traveller, a poor person's playgirl. She drinks too much but always seems to be on top of things.

Four strong women form the situation-of-womanhood in which we interpret our girl's life. Nothing like that today in mainstream films.

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

I admit I obtained this film because I wanted to see John Boles' performance (he's always been a heart throb of mine) but it was Nancy Carroll's superb and sensitive performance of a common dance hall girl from Brooklyn with a heart of gold which kept me watching, especially considering the poor quality of the print I obtained.

With this multi-faceted performance Nancy proved she was capable of much more than silly flapper roles. Her character is not self-serving in the least, while John Boles' character Paul is indecipherable. After admitting he is totally in love with the dance hall girl he then states he doesn't want to marry her. An unexpected pregnancy forces his hand and he does the honorable thing by marrying her, but the marriage is a secret one. We are to assume it was to protect his older daughter, but since we never see this daughter we don't have much sympathy for Paul's concerns.

The audience receives a typical happy Hollywood ending in Child of Manhattan but somehow it doesn't quite fit the sum total of the film.

Watch Child Of Manhattan (if you can find it) to see Nancy Carroll at her best.

Update: TCM has recently broadcast this film in a lovely print. That's the one to see.

Don't let the wedlock baby fool you. This is a version of the fairy-tale Cinderella story popular with Depression era audiences of the time. It comforts folks with the idea that rags- to-riches lightning may strike them if they just get noticed by a benevolent rich person, in this case John Boles with the rather double-edge name of "Vanderkill". What's suggested is that rescue from desperate economic conditions lies with joining established wealth instead of joining with other desperate folks to improve the common economic condition. I don't know how the screenplay compares with Sturges' stage play, but what's there on the screen looks processed in typical Hollywood fashion.

I realize this kind of perspective is unwelcome to most viewers who simply want to be entertained in engaging fashion. Certainly Nancy Caroll does that with a winning performance as the down-trodden girl. Her sheer spunk in the early scenes carries the movie, at the same time I couldn't help thinking how much her big eyes, high cheek bones and flattened hair-do resemble the popular Betty Boop character of the time. Too bad the rest of the cast doesn't come up to her level, especially Buck Jones' Panama Kelly whose unbelievably gallant nature helps produce the fairy tale outcome. Note also, how actual Depression era conditions are not allowed to intrude on the enclosed world of the lovers. To be fair, that may simply have resulted from a tight budget. But if so, the constraints help produce what appears to be the desired overall effect.

Whatever the movie's internal qualities, the relevance of the underlying message to that historical period needs to be pointed out. Because no matter how much we may wish otherwise, history has a nasty habit of repeating itself.

"Child of Manhattan" (1933) stars Nancy Carroll who is in nearly every scene of the film. Her co-star is John Boles, and then there is a lesser co-star who, believe it or not, is Charles "Buck" Jones - yes, the Western "B" movie star. Of course his Westerns are basically "A" films in the early years of his prominence at Columbia, but they're made for the audience that preferred the oaters to the "womens'" pictures or romantic "mush". "Child of Manhattan" is drama, romance, melodrama, social register, social commentary on mores, etc. It's 70 minutes of stirring the stew in the pot, and it certainly isn't any great shakes, but it's a fun watch. The ending is too sudden, even though we can figure it will end that way. By the way, no way it would end this way; okay, maybe one in twenty-five...maybe. Carroll is a dancer in a dime-a-dance joint, a business in a building owned by Boles' family. He's unaware it's even there, or his, but he goes to see it. His mother thinks it's disreputable. Boles and Carroll find each other. In the past, Western-type Jones had fallen for Carroll and even asked her to marry him. She's so far refused. Suddenly she finds herself pregnant with Boles' and her baby. She marries Boles. But she doesn't want to strap her husband into what she assumes is an unwanted marriage. SO - - - she goes to Mexico to get a divorce. Enter Luis Alberni as a lawyer. He's the very, very light-weight comedy, too. I won't divulge what happens from here on out. You can surely figure it out in your head. Just look at the cast...

Decent little meller, without much meller. Much more romance. There's the large dollop of social commentary. Even some Depression material (very little!). I liked it enough to give it a 6 out of 10 score on the movie love/hate gradation scale. Carroll herself is very good in this. Boles does things by rote. Buck Jones is Buck Jones is Buck Jones. I enjoyed watching him do something like this. It's the kind of part that just a year later (and even a couple of years earlier) would have been played by Ralph Bellamy. There, now I've given away a lot of what I didn't say before. Along for the ride in this are Jessie Ralph, Clara Blandick, Jane Darwell, Warburton Gamble, and even, if you look hard enough, Betty Grable. Nat Pendleton and Matthew Betz are prominent in one or two little scenes, too.