Over the Counter (MGM, 1932)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Fortunately, after Super Fly I kept Turner Classic Movies on for a really engaging 20-minute musical short by MGM, Over the Counter, directed by future MGM musical producer Jack Cummings and advertised as “A Colortone Musical” because it was filmed entirely in two-strip Technicolor. For some reason the credits listed “Color by Technicolor Process” but did not credit an actual cinematographer – a real pity because the camerawork is quite good, avoiding the over-bright reds and greens the process was partial to in lesser hands and giving the film an overall salmon and turquoise color scheme that was very appealing. (Two-strip Technicolor had one major limit – it could not photograph blue, though it could come close with colors like teal – but I often find it quite harmonious, painterly and more pleasant than the often shrieking hues of the three-strip process that replaced it.) Over the Counter takes place in the Drake Department Store, whose owner, Mr. Drake (Sidney Toler in one of his rare non-Asian roles; though he was American-born he had a natural slant to his eyes that is readily apparent here and helped make him credible as the screen’s replacement Charlie Chan), is dealing with open rebellion from his staff, including Franklin Pangborn at his most prissily exasperated. The rebellion is over the new policies Drake’s son Freddy (Emerson Treacy) is instituting, including laying off the sales clerks and replacing them with the “MGM Dancing Girls.”

Freddy has also instituted a system called “Check Your Husband,” by which women shopping at the Drake store can literally check their husbands and then go through the store and spend all their husbands’ money without them being around to say no. One husband (Jack “Tiny” Lipson) tears up his number, which of course is 13, in hopes that means his wife can never reclaim him – but the MGM dancing girl who checked him in replaces his tag, and his wife (Tiny Schwartz) grabs him back with a parody of the “Check Your Husband” song called “De-Check My Husband.” There’s also a bizarre sequence in which the store literally offers babies for sale, and the nurse who offers them is wearing a white uniform emblazoned with a red cross on her chest whose broken arms make it look like a swastika. (The young Betty Grable is in this movie as the woman who tries to talk her husband into buying one of the babies, though he begs off.) Obviously MGM thought they could get away with this a year before Adolf Hitler took power in Germany and, among other things, made the swastika “politically incorrect” big-time in U.S. films. Even American directors who wanted to dramatize the horrors of Nazism were frequently told not to show swastikas until German refugee Fritz Lang made Man Hunt in 1941 and laid down the law to producer Darryl F. Zanuck and told him, “You can’t expect me to make an anti-Nazi movie without showing swastikas.” I suspect the baby-selling sequence in Over the Counter was inspired by the vending-machine babies in the science-fiction musical Just Imagine only two years earlier. With songs by a virtually unknown writer named George Frank Rubens (I’d certainly never heard of him before!), appealingly sung by Eleanor Thatcher and Maurene Marseilles, as well as a couple of acrobatic male dancers who do break-dancing well before break-dancing became a “thing,” Over the Counter is a genuinely charming vest-pocket musical, and the well-used two-strip Technicolor only adds to its appeal.