Hot Saturday

Newcomer Cary Grant was paired with Paramount star Nancy Carroll in Hot Saturday, a film which is most dated, but still packs quite a punch. Nancy Carroll's stardom was beginning to slip while Cary as we know was fast on the rise.

Hot Saturday however is about gossip, something that will eternally be with us. But happy to say some people's attitudes have definitely changed for the better. Nancy Carroll would not be fired today from her job at a bank because of her private life.

Carroll's a popular girl with all the young men of her town, but she's engaged to stalwart Randolph Scott who's a promising young engineer. One of her fellow co-workers at the bank Edward Wood tries to put the moves on her, but she won't give him a tumble. It's he who starts a nasty rumor about Carroll and the town playboy Cary Grant who is guilty of nothing more than offering her a ride home in his car after she ran off from Woods.

Depending on where you are from malicious gossip will probably not have the effect it does on Nancy Carroll. Still it can damage one. Years ago in a former place of work and we're talking now about the 1970s I recall in my office there was a section known as the 'poison pond'. It was where a few women who had nothing else to do but gossip about everything and everyone else around. No escaped their malicious tongues and something like what happens to Nancy Carroll would have been grist for that mill for a month.

Thank God people have a more live and let live attitude, but gossip is still a perennial problem and Hot Saturday deals nicely with it.