Shortly before screenwriter Frances Marion resurrected Marie Dressler’s career, the old gal, once the comedic toast of stage & screen, had hit rock bottom, holding on to a good address by living in a glorified laundry closet at a lux NYC hotel, waiting for offers to act, scanning the want ads for a housekeeping job. Less than five years later, Marion’s scripts & support had made her old friend the unlikeliest Hollywood star in the early Depression years. A perfect moment to use that housekeeping idea in this slightly ludicrous, largely irresistible sentimental nonsense, one of the year’s top grossers, with Marie as the Mother Courage of all domestics, martyr to a passel of ungrateful brats she herself raised after Mom died in childbirth just as their newly widowed father hit the jackpot with his scientific inventions. Whew! Now living like nouveaux riche royalty, Dressler’s still nanny, cook, housekeeper, advisor, nurse . . . and twenty years overdue for a vacation. But when Pop (Jean Hersholt) spontaneously comes along on the trip and proposes, the older kids go into snobbish shock. Only Richard Cromwell, scapegrace of the litter who truly loves Dressler, cheers her on. But then Dad dies, leaving everything to Marie (not that she wants it!) and the ingrates concoct a murder plot with circumstantial evidence against Marie. Yikes! Silly doings not for the fainthearted. Yet there really was no one like Marie Dressler, with her empathetic genius at cutting directly to people’s funnybones & emotions, fussy manner giving way to stillness at crisis points. (The mother’s childbirth death done with shocking, matter-of-fact bluntness.) Fun to see Myrna Loy as a rotter, one of the ghastly children, and the underrated Cromwell, very engaging as the one nice kid. Director Clarence Brown keeps everyone on their feet and above water, barely, but a couple of overhead model plane shots, showing Cromwell flying home thru a rainstorm, are something to see.
DOUBLE-BILL: Best entry point for Dressler is George Cukor’s all-star DINNER AT EIGHT/’33. (see below)
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