It's All Yours (Columbia, 1937)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 10 p.m. I showed my husband Charles a movie I’d stumbled on via YouTube: It’s All Yours, a 1937 fusion of romantic and screwball comedy made by Columbia Pictures (though released – at least in the print we were watching – on their Screen Gems TV subsidiary) and directed by Elliott Nugent from a story by Adelaide Heilbron and a script by Mary C. McCall, Jr. Wealthy San Francisco attorney E. J. Barnes (J. C. Nugent, Elliott Nugent’s real-life father) is on his deathbed and is understandably concerned that his nephew Jimmy Barnes (Francis Lederer) will burn through his $4 million fortune in nothing flat, especially since he’s already dating a gold-digging showgirl, Constance Marlow (Grace Bradley). So he cuts a new will disinheriting Jimmy and leaving all $4 million to his secretary, Linda Gray (Madeleine Carroll, top-billed). Then he dies and Linda, who’s secretly in unrequited love with Jimmy even though what we see of him is pretty creepy, decides to go on a spending spree of her own, proposing to sell the Market Street blocks the firm owns and invest the money in the hot dog franchise for the local baseball team (this was 22 years before the Giants moved to San Francisco, and professional baseball there was strictly minor-league in both senses of the term).

What she’s really trying to do is prod Jimmy into taking his responsibilities seriously and acting as a normal, businesslike aduit, whereupon she’ll gladly turn her fortune over to him as the rightful heir. She moves to New York City and Jimmy follows her, but in the meantime while on the plane over she meets and starts dating a gold-digging French baron named René de Montigny (Mischa Auer, who’s easily the best thing in the movie), who’s already been through three failed marriages (one wonders if the writers based the character on the notorious Mdivani brothers: Serge, who married movie star Pola Negri; David, who married movie star Mae Murray; and Alexis, who married an Astor heiress and then divorced her to marry an even richer woman, Barbara Hutton; all three Mdivani males burned through their wives’ fortunes) and is after Linda because she has money and he wants it. They go on a dinner date at the “Ritz Plaza Hotel,” where she is staying (and Franklin Pangborn – who else? – is the desk clerk) and she’s momentarily taken aback when he sticks her with the check.

Meanwhile Jimmy is in cahoots with his uncle’s former law partner, Alexander Duncan (Charles Waldron, best known as the crippled General Sternwood in The Big Sleep), to break the will legally and win himself back the fortune – only Duncan is secretly double-crossing him by sending the secretary who witnessed the will signing out of town until October 31 and telling her not to come back until that date. Linda and René go on a picnic and Jimmy and Constance get back together and follow them – only their one food item is caramel apples and Constance can’t stand them. At one point René sends them a kind of CARE package from their meal, including such high-class food as caviar and paté (to which I joked, “Fish eggs and raw liver? That doesn’t sound like that great a lunch to me”), but Jimmy virtuously refuses it. Meanwhile Alexander Duncan is getting ready to play yet another trick on Jimmy: now that he’s taken a responsible job (first as Linda’s office assistant and then a real job clerking for another lawyer), he makes up a will to the effect that after writing the will that disinherited Jimmy, E. J. thought better of it and wrote a new new will that left Jimmy the $4 million after all. Only this will is a fake, prepared by Duncan after E. J.’s death. Jimmy takes the envelope from Duncan without bothering to read it – though Linda hears about it and thinks she’s lost the fortune after all, and René proposes to her even though he has no money and thinks she has none, either.

The climax occurs at the New York bureau of records, which sells marriage licenses, and when Jimmy hears that Linda is about to marry René he goes to stop the proceedings – and the put-upon clerk is in the middle of performing the marriage ceremony when Jimmy breaks in. he and Linda start sucking face, and the clerk realizes that Linda isn’t going to get married just yet, at least not to René. Fortunately salvation appears for René in the form of a buxom heiress to whom he is immediately attracted … to her bankroll, anyway. It’s All Yours is a movie perched uneasily between romantic comedy and screwball, and its best moments are the ones that feature Mischa Auer: when he shows up at the marriage registry he practically gets a good-customer discount, and when the clerk explains that he has to present his three divorce certificates, he just happens to have them right there. “You repeat customers always show up just before 5!” the anxious, put-upon clerk explains. Mischa Auer is the most entertaining element of this film, and even knowing that he’s only after Linda for her money we still would rather have Linda end up with him than with Jimmy: René might send her to the poorhouse but she’d have a lot more fun on the way there!

Apparently Francis Lederer was just as obnoxious off-screen as he was on: two years earlier he had been signed to co-star with Katharine Hepburn in the drama Break of Hearts, only for the two days he worked on the film he was so demanding about his camera angles and other divo behavior that Hepburn told RKO studio head Pandro S. Berman to fire him. (He did so and his replacement was Charles Boyer, who did fine in an undistinguished film; he and Hepburn stayed friends and they hoped to do another film together, but they never did until 1969’s The Madwoman of Chaillot, in which Hepburn starred and Boyer had a bit character role as a broker.) Not only does his thick foreign accent make it unbelievable every time he insists that he’s an American (he was born November 6, 1899 in Prague), he’s so overbearing you can’t want that nice, young, attractive and rich Madeleine Carroll to bet stuck with him till death do them part.

Certainly this film would be a lot more entertaining with Cary Grant in the part – his Cockney accent wasn’t all that believable for an American, either, but at least his native language was English, and he had already shown a flair for those romantic-comedy roles, but at the time this film was made he was at Columbia co-starring with Irene Dunne in a far greater movie, The Awful Truth. (I still think one of the great cultural tragedies was that Cary Grant was never cast in a film of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: he was Gatsby in real life – a man of humble origins who transcended them and became a rich and mysterious romantic figure – and it’s hard to imagine anyone else being able to make the character believable: certainly Robert Redford and Leonardo DiCaprio couldn’t do it,) I liked It’s All Yours better as we were watching it than I do writing about it now – a reverse of some other films I wrote blog posts about and actually felt better about when I wrote about them and forced myself to think more deeply about them – it’s a pleasant enough movie and YouTube contributor Susan Cervantes wrote that it was “wonderfully predictable, thank God!” But the more I think about this movie, the more I’m perturbed that the old-fashioned Hollywood conventions will condemn that nice young Madeleine Carroll to a lifetime with a stuck-up asshole like Francis Lederer.