The Lady and the Lug (Warner Bros., Vitaphone Corporation, 1940)

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

Oddly, after The Harder They Come on Saturday, December 13 TCM showed a 20-minute short called The Lady and the Lug (1940) that was also about the boxing game and in particular about a hapless would-be fighter who’s totally hopeless in the ring. The Lady and the Lug was a vehicle for the celebrated party hostess Elsa Maxwell, who plays herself. Her nephew Doug Abbott (future TV Superman George Reeves) has just won, in a poker game, the management contract of would-be boxer Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom (also playing himself). Maxwell hits on the idea of staging a boxing exhibition at her latest benefit for the Milk Fund (a common charity in the 1930’s which existed to raise money for babies from poor parents to have access to milk; it’s still around, by the way, albeit under various names) between Rosenbloom and championship contender “One-Punch” McGurk (Frank Hagney). Maxwell trains with Rosenbloom and paces him during his running workouts, which he keeps trying to cut short because he gets too tired, and when Rosenbloom finds out whom he’s going to be fighting in the big Milk Fund bout he wants to bail, At this point we’re probably wondering why Maxwell doesn’t put her nephew in the ring instead – “He is from Krypton, after all!” I couldn’t resist joking to myself – but instead she talks Rosenbloom into getting into the ring after all. Only McGurk decides to fight dirty, so Maxwell throws off her society duds, gets into the ring herself, and knocks out the would-be champ. Directed by Warners’ “B”-meister William McGann from a committee-written script (Owen Crump and Jack Henley, “original” story; Charles R. Marion and Arthur V. Jones, screenplay), The Lady and the Lug is a charming little curio that, among other things, showed Warners’ cluelessness about what to do with George Reeves. He signed with the studio around the same time they picked up another tall, lanky, barely coordinated young actor named Ronald Reagan, who of course went on to even bigger and arguably better things than George Reeves did!