ACCENT ON LOVE (1941)

Highly prized/highly paid, screenwriter Dalton Trumbo is probably the best known of the Hollywood Ten, the ‘card carrying’ members of the Communist Party who went to jail in the late ‘40s rather than ‘cooperate’ (‘naming names’ of other members) to Washington’s HCUA investigators.  The public justification was that they were, as a group under Russian orders, slipping Commie Doctrine and 'The Party Line' into film scripts to warp weak American minds.  (And good luck finding anything more dangerous than a communal rooming house for single women to share during the wartime housing shortage.  Gals voting on common space issues?  The horror!)  If they’d only gone back to 1941, they might have salivated over this ‘original’ Trumbo story (heavily indebted to Frank Capra’s film adaptation of Kaufman/Hart’s YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU/’38; its stupid, lazy screenplay credited to John Francis Larkin) which touches a Marxist third-rail in having George Montgomery’s junior investment exec, toss fat-cat Capitalist father-in-law Thurston Hall to the side so he can be his own man, working with his hands (and a shovel) digging ditches for the WPA and sharing a tenement flat with Portuguese foreman J. Carroll Naish & famille.   (Carroll also Marxist, but in looks & accent Chico Marxist!)  Montgomery also dumping his wife for fetching immigrant Osa Massen.  All living in a crumbling tenement apartment building owned by (wait for it) father-in-law Hall.  Naturally, this being Hollywood, an overnight stay at the flat opens Pop’s eyes to inequality.  He even drinks a toast to FDR.  Yikes!  On the other hand, the film has a rare pro-divorce message.  (Take that Catholic Joe Breen, head of the Production Code.)  The film, so chock-a-block with touchy issues, it’s a shame execution such a washout under director Ray McCarey, kid brother of the great Leo McCarey.*

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/LINK:  *Ray McCarey, starting in comedy shorts like big brother Leo, but then going on to make tons of forgettable features, unlike Leo who in his early shorts put Laurel & Hardy together and then relatively few films, but some were classics like THE AWFUL TRUTH and THE BELLS OF ST. MARY’S/’45  before drying up and offering MY SON JOHN/’52, possibly the most ridiculous of all the anti-commie fear mongering pics.  It’s the one where mom Helen Hayes thinks son Robert Walker has turned ‘red’ when she finds out he’s been playing tennis.  (Maybe Leo was doing penance for his brother’s soul.)   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/12/my-son-john.html

CONTEST:  *Ray McCarey not the only less prominent kid brother working on this movie.  Name the other creative sibling with a more famous older brother to win a MAKQUIBS Write-Up of a streaming pic of your choice . . . assuming I can get it online!