The Cheaters (Republic, 1945)

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

Last night [Wednesday, December 20] I stumbled on two quite interesting Christmas-themed films on Turner Classic Movies, one of which I’d never heard of before and one which was an old favorite of mine but one I hadn’t seen in decades. The one I’d never heard of before was The Cheaters, released by Republic Pictures in 1945 (and reissued for television as The Castaway in 1949) and a quite charming screwball comedy even though 1945 was pretty late in the day for that genre. It centers around a family, the Pidgeons, who are presumably well-to-do but whose finances are about to collapse thanks to the financial failure of the family’s head, attorney and developer James C. Pidgeon (Eugene Pallette at his most Eugene Pallette-ish), whose business manager is trying to convince him that he’s broke. He lives with a wife, Clara (Billie Burke), and their two daughters, Therese (Ruth Terry) and Angela (Anne Gillis). Therese is dating a U.S. servicemember, Stephen Bates (Robert Livingston), whose family also comes from money, and Angela is a stuck-up bitch on the cusp of puberty. They also have a third child, college-age son Reggie (David Holt), who’s as stuck-up as his sisters. James Pidgeon is hoping that the imminent death of his brother will bail them out financially, but unbeknownst to him the brother has left his $5 million fortune to an actress he saw decades before as a child in a production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and assigned an attorney to find her whereabouts and give her the money. Meanwhile the Pidgeons take in a “charity case,” a long-retired actor named Anthony Marchand (Joseph Schildkraut, top-billed), not because they’re feeling particularly charitable but because the Bateses take in a charity case every year at Christmas and Therese figures that if her family does so, too, it will impress the Bateses enough that they’ll accept her as a daughter-in-law.

Disabled in a car crash a decade earlier, Anthony has worked his way down a series of increasingly menial jobs until he was rendered homeless after he fell asleep on the job during his last gig as a night watchman and accidentally set the store on fire with his cigarette. Nonetheless, he and James set out to find the mystery woman to whom James’s brother left the $5 million – and actually locate her. She turns out to be struggling young actress Florie Watson (Ona Munson, delivering a nice, down-to-earth performance that’s one of the highlights of the film), and since James has talked his brother’s lawyer into abandoning the search for her if they don’t find her in a week, thereby allowing James to inherit the money, they invite her over for Christmas dinner but secretly want to keep her from finding out that she’s now a multimillionaire. When a local paper publishes the story about her inheritance, the Pidgeons keep it from her, though Anthony sees the paper and figures it out but keeps quiet about it. Ultimately the Pidgeons move to a remote house in the country owned by one of James’s clients, who’s on vacation in England, and because the place has no electricity and no phone service they figure they can keep Florie from finding out about her inheritance for the requisite week. There are also a couple of hard-nosed private eyes who trace the Pidgeons to their country home to blow the whole thing and announce to Florie that she’s really rich and the Pidgeons are trying to keep her well-gotten gains from her. Ultimately, inspired by Anthony’s recitation of parts of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, the Pidgeons relent and tell Florie about the inheritance, whereupon she and Anthony decide she’ll share half of it with them.

The Cheaters was the brainchild of husband-and-wife writing team Albert Ray and Frances Hyland, and apparently they originally thought it up in the late 1930’s when they offered it to studios with John Barrymore as Anthony and Carole Lombard as Florie. Alas, by the time they’d sold the story both Barrymore and Lombard were dead, he of the long-term damage he’d done to himself by alcoholism and she in a plane crash, and by the time the story finally sold to Republic Albert Ray was dead, too, so Frances Hyland got co-credit for the story with her late husband but took the screenwriting credit on her own. The Cheaters turned out to be a quite good and entertaining movie, an example of the state-of-the-art studio Republic founder and CEO Herbert Yates built for himself and his company. Its director was Joseph Kane, who usually made Republic’s “B” Westerns but this time got a decent-sized budget and a few at least quasi-major stars as well as an “associate producer” credit. I would hardly call The Cheaters a great movie, but it’s certainly well done and charming in its way, and given how notoriously Right-wing Herbert Yates was, it’s surprising to hear at least some vaguely progressive dialogue in the film.