Shopworn (Columbia, 1932)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Late last night (Thursday, July 10) my husband Charles and I watched an unusual 1932 movie on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEgu9ts4oA0): Shopworn, a Columbia production that starred Barbara Stanwyck as Kitty Lane, daughter of a construction worker who gets killed in the film’s spectacular opening: a whole mountain gets dynamited to clear the way for a new road. I suspect the crew at Columbia followed the old Mack Sennett stratagem of scouring the newspapers for announcements of some big spectacular event that was going to happen anyway, then sending a crew to film it and building a story around it. (Sennett’s most famous use of that gimmick was when he heard that a reservoir was to be drained. He got the idea of sending a comedy couple out in a rowboat and having them row across the reservoir, then look appropriately panicked and scared when the water started disappearing around them.) With his dying breath, dad tells Kitty to stay with his sister Dot (ZaSu Pitts, mournful as usual; I can’t watch her play these deadpan comic roles without ruing the tragedy that the self-destruction of Erich von Stroheim’s directorial career wreaked on Pitts as well: Stroheim insisted that Pitts was the screen’s potentially greatest tragic actress, and they proved it in the three films he made with her – Greed, The Wedding March, and Hello, Sister! – but she never got the sort of break Sally Field did 50 years later with Sybil and Norma Rae). Dot co-runs a restaurant in a college town with her husband Fred (Lucien Littlefield). They put Kitty to work as a waitress in the restaurant, and she predictably gets hit on by all the horny young college boys who eat the establishment’s miniature hamburgers, essentially a silver dollar-sized meat patty drowned on a full-sized bun. At one point she rejects an especially persistent suitor by hitting the button on her cash register that reads, “NO SALE.”

One young collegian catches her eye: David Livingston (Regis Toomey), a medical student whom she agrees to date. They have a nice affair that includes a trip to an amusement park where they get a photo taken together against a fake Middle Eastern desert backdrop. The cameraman running the concession is using a big old view camera (there’s a charming shot of Stanwyck and Toomey with their images upside down as the photographer would see them), only they ruin the first take by impulsively kissing each other. Ultimately David decides he wants to marry Kitty, but he runs into a stone wall of opposition from his neurotically overprotective mother (Clara Blandick – that’s right, Auntie Em from The Wizard of Oz as a villain!). Mrs. Livingston and her friend, the influential Judge Forbes (Oscar Apfel), first offer Kitty a $5,000 payment to leave David alone. When she angrily refuses, in the closest Stanwyck comes in this movie to her fabled emotional intensity, they use their social power to frame Kitty for violating the public morality act and get her sentenced to 30 days in a workhouse. They also get David to accompany his mother to Europe and trick him into thinking that Kitty accepted the bribe, and Kitty’s marital uncle Fred backs up their lie because Judge Forbes has bribed Fred with $100 to do so. (At first Judge Forbes tries to palm Fred off with a check to be sent later, but he’s got sense enough to insist on an immediate cash payment.) When Kitty finally serves her sentence, Fred doesn’t want her back and neither does any reputable employer, but she stumbles on a theatre that advertises “40 Beautiful Girls 40” and gets a job in their chorus. Within the space of a few minutes of a montage sequence, Kitty has risen through the ranks and become a major star. She’s also attracted a French male admirer, André Renoir (Albert Conti), who’s offering her a European tour and all the money and boyfriends she could want.

David tries to see her after a show, but she decides to get her revenge against him by pretending to want to see him and then not showing up. When she’s named as the co-respondent in a divorce suit – illustrated by big headlines in a newspaper – she retreats to the small town where she started her journey six years earlier. By now David has finished medical school and become a highly regarded surgeon – part of his repute comes from his ability to claim (rightly) that he finished his medical education in Europe – but his mother still has him tied tightly to her apron strings. When a local paper announces that the notorious Kitty Lane is coming to town, mom first tries to hide the paper from David and then, when he demands to see it, concocts a big social dinner at the local hotel restaurant and insists that he show up. By luck – or authorial fiat – Kitty is dining alone at the same restaurant on the same night, and David gets so bored with the company at his mom’s big table he bails on the party and joins Kitty at her table. Ultimately Kitty invites David to her room, but mom shows up too, crashes the party, and ultimately pulls a gun (the derringer that was established in movies as “the woman’s gun”) on Kitty and threatens to shoot. Kitty walks towards Mrs. Livingston, daring her to shoot her, and ultimately mom wimps out and Kitty takes the gun from her. Eventually it ends as you’d expect it to, with mom reluctantly accepting Kitty as her daughter-in-law and Kitty and David smooching on the couch at the fade-out. It was the sort of ending that to me raised more questions than it answered. Was David going to expect Kitty to give up her star career in show business and just be a stay-at-home wife and mother to their eventual children? Were they going to try to make it work as a two-career couple (obviously far more common now than it was in 1932)? And would David’s medical practice suffer from him being married to That Kind of Woman – which was one of the reasons Mrs. Livingston was so determined to break them up in the first place?

Shopworn had a mediocre director – Nicholas Grinde (usually credited as Nick Grinde, and sometimes as Nick Grindé, with the accent), a journeyman “B” director who cranked them out so fast a lot of Hollywood jokesters thought his last name was all too appropriate. But it had real talent at the writers’ desks: the basic story was by Sarah Y. Mason (who, with her husband Victor Heerman, would write the script for the stunning 1933 adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, directed by George Cukor and starring Katharine Hepburn) and the actual script was by two future Frank Capra collaborators, Jo Swerling and Robert Riskin. The cinematographer, Joseph Walker, and the editor, Gene Havlick, were also Capra people. Shopworn was billed on its YouTube post as a product of the so-called “pre-Code” era, 1930 to 1934, when the Motion Picture Production Code was enforced relatively loosely, but the only version that seems to survive was a 66-minute “post-Code” edit from the late 1930’s. The existing title cards bear a Code certificate number 4749R, the “R” indicating a reissue. Shopworn is a quite good movie of its type, and though the film was presumably edited for its “post-Code” reissue I didn’t notice any of the blatant lacunae we’ve seen in other movies, like Mae West’s 1934 film Belle of the Nineties, that got caught in the transition between loose and strict Code enforcement.

In his autobiography Frank Capra wrote about Stanwyck’s greatest weakness as a film actress – that she gave her best performance on the first take, and anything she did after that was just a pale copy. Capra described how he worked around this by shooting Stanwyck’s close-ups first, with multiple cameras so she would only have to do the scene once. I suspect Archie Mayo did that for one of Stanwyck’s best early films, Ever in My Heart (1933), in which she played a woman whose marriage to a German is broken up and doomed by World War I (it’s essentially Romeo and Juliet, only instead of the lovers being broken up by two feuding families, it’s two feuding countries), but I don’t think Grinde bothered. Also one major disappointment with Shopworn was that we don’t get to see any scenes of Stanwyck actually performing on stage – though she was a quite capable singer, maybe not at the level of the top white women jazz singers of the time (Mildred Bailey and Connee Boswell), but well enough to sing in The Purchase Price (1932), made two films after Shopworn, as well as in Ball of Fire (1941), in which she sang “Drumboogie” with Gene Krupa’s band, and Lady of Burlesque (1943). Shopworn doesn’t offer Stanwyck at her best (I still think she’s the greatest movie actress of all time, mainly for her versatility, matched by no other woman in the classic era and only one, Meryl Streep, since) but it’s still a raw, appealing movie that touches on moral dilemmas that are very much alive today, including the ability of the 1 percent to wreck the lives of anyone else for sometimes maddeningly arbitrary reasons and do it with impunity.