Saleslady

Anne Nagel tells her grandfather, Harry Davenport, that it's time she gets married, but she wants a husband who wants to marry her, not her grandfather's mattress business. So she moves to Chicago and gets a job. Soon she meets on-the-make Weldon Heyburn, who proposes, but before she can tell him about the family fortune, he starts the usual guff about the man of the family making the money. Soon they are living fairly well, with everything bought on credit, until the crunch comes, and then....

It's a cheap but mildly ambitious effort from Monogram, and pretty good in the acting department, as you might expert with Miss Nagel and Mr. Davenport. Unhappily, while Mr. Heyburn is good looking, he's one of those actors who substitutes an emphatic delivery for emotion, and it grows tiresome after a bit. The result remains watchable through the end, thanks to a fine supporting cast, but rarely more than that.

Anna Nagel plays Mary in this Monogram picture. When the story begins, Mary goes to work--even though she comes from a rich family. On this job, she meets and falls in love with Bob and they marry. He has no idea she's loaded....so she decides not to tell him. In the meantime, Bob makes a lot of dumb choices....buying too many things on credit and getting heavily in debt. Eventually, debt collectors begin repossessing their stuff.

When Mary gets hurt and goes to the hospital, it comes out that she's got money and her grandfather (Harry Davenport) can bail them out of their predicament by giving Bob a great job. But Bob is a proud man and refuses...and alienates his wife in the process. What's next for these two?

The film has a very strong old fashioned message that a man is THE breadwinner and should NEVER rely on his wife...ever. This is pretty stupid when you think about it....but Bob wanting to work his own way out of his financial mess is commendable. Overall, a decent film with the oddly old fashioned theme. Good acting but only fair writing consign this one to the time-passer category.

For the most part, "Saleslady" is a bland and too-often trite romantic comedy. The premise is perhaps of mild interest: Mary is an heiress who wants to live a life of her own, and to be appreciated 'for herself', so she moves away from her rich grandfather, takes a job in a department store, and marries fellow employee Bob, who has no idea who she is. With the young couple in financial difficulty, Mary is then faced with the question of whether to ask her grandfather to bail them out.

The story that follows is only slightly satisfying, and is not very plausible. Most of the characters are likeable but dull, the dialogue is stale, and on numerous occasions Bob is annoyingly stupid. The one bright spot is Harry Davenport as the grandfather - the character is routine (as are his lines), but Davenport is a good character actor who knows how to give him a little life.

It's not unpleasant to watch, but it does not offer very many reasons to do so, either. Overall, there just is not enough here to recommend it.

All in all, it's a bland Monogram programmer. There's no real plot or suspense; instead the screenplay simply unwinds. The main aspect amounts to whether newly weds Nagel and Heyburn can make enough money to afford his free spending for her sake. After a persistent courtship, they marry. What Heyburn doesn't know is that Nagel's an heiress with a wealthy grandpa, but she's bored by the wealthy lifestyle. So, incognito, she gets a job in a new city, meets Heyburn, and embarks on a more routine lifestyle they can't really afford. So, will the struggling couple somehow manage or will Nagel finally seek help from wealthy grandpa.

Fortunately, the two leads inject personality into their roles that helps compensate the lack of their under-dramatized plight. Then too, I wonder how much Depression Era audiences sympathized with Nagel's rejection of a wealthy lifestyle they could only dream about. But then I guess her true love is supposed to compensate. As an old movie buff, I'd never seen or heard of Heyburn. He seems to have had an "uncredited" career. From here it looks like he deserved better. Anyway, look for cowboy star Don (Red) Barry in a bit part as a salesman of all things. All in all, the leads are better than the material or the flat direction. Otherwise it's an utterly forgettable sixty minutes.

The rich lady is pretty but her character is given less depth than a dishrag. She interacts with her grandfather and a streetwise dame at a boarding house and everything is going along fine, just some nice and digestible pre-war pabulum, but then the main dude arrives and he just pollutes the screen. I wanted to invent a time machine so I go back and kick his ass. He looks like if you tried to make a old time "handsome man" mask out of biscuit dough. His voice is nasally and his laugh lines made my pelvis hurt, as if I were bracing for a kick. And worst of all his character is a gross jerk. But the dumb rich woman falls for him and so he sticks around. Whenever he's not on screen the movie is completely tolerable but then he comes back and it's bad again.