The Hot Heiress

High-rise construction worker Ben Lyon (as "Hap" Harrigan) notices "The Hot Heiress" Ona Munson (as Juliette Hunter) in an apartment window. Although he's only a common laborer, the pair fall in love. They begin dating, with Ms. Munson's snooty friends mistaking Mr. Lyon for an architect. At a swanky charity bazaar, Lyon's co-worker pal Tom Dugan (as Bill Dugan) gets drunk and reveals the truth about Lyon being poor, to Munson's romantic rival, a well-heeled Walter Pidgeon (as Clay).

Lyon, who found success with "Hell's Angels" (1930), is sure-footed on the construction beams, but not a memorable singer. The Rogers & Hart songs weren't their best. Leading lady Munson, from the stage, was most memorable as the veteran prostitute "Belle" in "Gone with the Wind" (1939). The film's staging wasn't bad for 1931, but everything else is ordinary. Lyon's character "Hap" Harrigan has nothing to do with the plainclothes adventure hero "Hop" Harrigan, who was popular in the 1940s.

**** The Hot Heiress (3/28/31) Clarence Badger ~ Ben Lyon, Ona Munson, Tom Dugan, Walter Pidgeon

Not many musical comedies feature a riveter as the leading man. Ben Lyon is Hap Harrigan singing tunes about how only his mother loves a riveter across the steel beams he traverses with Broadway ease. He and his partner Bill Dugan, played by Tom Dugan, espy the comely Ona Munson asleep with the windows open next door in her high-rise Park Ave. apartment. Gob- smacked by this vision, Hap misses a hot rivet thrown his way and it lands in the apartment and starts a fire. Naturally, the boys hop into the apartment to save this half-naked damsel who is grateful enough to fall in love with Hap. She's out of his league, as they say, but even though she's rich, she likes the simpler things like working class muscular riveters. Rogers and Hart wrote some ditties for the picture. Inez Courtney is the most fun as Dugan's girlfriend and there's a young Walter Pigeon as the snobby alternative. Stiff and confused, he looks to be three feet taller than than everyone else. An early talkie, its still interesting even if just from an archaeological perspective. Boy and girl meet cute, love at first rivet, boy and girl break up, boy and girl end together happily.

I happened to read about "The Hot Heiress" while looking at a list of Clarence Badger's movies, so I decided to check it out. Pretty hackneyed plot, with a construction worker catching sight of a attractive gal in an apartment across the street, so they start up a relationship, but she has to hide his working-class background from her inner circle.

I think that it's safe to say "Dirty Dancing" did a much more interesting job with this kind of story (at the very least, it wasn't a musical). While this one contains some stuff that wouldn't have been acceptable under the Hays Code, it's mostly nothing interesting.

This is a very inconsequential film, a curio really. Ben Lyon is a riveter, and the film opens with him singing to his partner on the job. Rich girl Ona Munson is at a window, he steps in (the window) for lunch, and then takes her out on a double date to a Chinese restaurant that evening. She then invites him out to their country house to meet the folks, the double-daters also coming along. After complications, they get together again. That's the plot, but there's even less here than it sounds. The film gets by--barely--on two things. First there's Lyon's bright performance. Second is the unapologetic vulgarity, brashness and total lack of etiquette and decorum of the double-daters (Tom Dugan and Inez Courtney) and, to some extent, Lyons. For example, in the Chinese restaurant, the guys pass food back and forth to each other, ignoring the gals in between who try to grab some. The film's biggest hoot is the zany and uninhibited dancing in this scene. There's very little class snobbery displayed, the film being too trifling to have that sort of unpleasantness. Pidgeon, barely in the film, doesn't plot and scheme much, merely reveals at an inopportune moment that Lyon is a riveter. The best one can say about the film is that, though it's VERY slight, it's not quite as tiresome as it might have been.

"The Hot Heiress" was one of 10 movies that Ben Lyon made in 1931. The popular leading man, though mostly in B movies, transitioned well from silent to sound movies with a good voice that could carry a tune along with his looks and persona. This is a fairly good comedy for its time. It's a slice of life about the wealthy and the common working folks. When romance crosses the two with Lyons' Hap Harrigan, and wealthy Ona Munson's Juliette, the sparks fly. Well, sparks fly quite a bit in this film with riveters working on the girders of a rising skyscraper.

Not many films have been made that show men - whether actors, stunt men, or real workers, plying their trades in the skeleton shell of a high rise building. That's quite interesting in itself.

Ben Lyon and Bebe Daniels, who were married in 1930, before WW II moved to England where they were hit performers and had a popular radio show for many years. Movie buffs will see Walter Pidgeon in an early sound film, as a jilted suitor of Juliette. Munson would die of a suicide OD in 1955 at age 51. And another cast member, Thelma Todd, as Lola, would die in four years at age 29 of carbon monoxide poisoning. Although there was never a court case, there was speculation over her death. Was it accidental, suicide or homicide?

Here are some favorite lines from this film.

Juliette, "Don't bother about money. Money never worried me." Hap Harrigan, "Yeah, money never worries them that's got it."

Hap Harrigan, "I got principles. Haven't you got principles?" Juliette, "Yes. But I've got a heart too."

Juliette, "I don't care about luxuries. I could live in a tent, if the plumbing was good."