NR | 1h 27m | Drama | 1948
Money is like blood: It’s no good unless it’s circulating. That’s the point of producer-director Allan Dwan’s lighthearted film about a quiet town in Vermont. The less lighthearted backdrop is the Great Depression: Nearly everyone’s indebted and struggling to repay.
A stranger in town, Eustace Peabody (Roscoe Karns) arrives at Silver Creek Inn with $1,000 meant for Ab Follansbee (Tom Fadden). But Follansbee’s not back until later that day. So, while Peabody waits, inn manager Uncle Ed (Charles Winninger, who is also the narrator) stores the dough in the inn’s vault, but absentmindedly doesn’t alert inn proprietor Horace Taylor (Gene Lockhart). Horace, imagining the money’s his, pays off a pressing debt to grocer Johnson.
But Johnson had pressured Horace to repay his debt to him only because businesswoman Geraldine Atherton (Florence Bates) had pressured Johnson to repay his debt to her. Never mind that she’d wanted that money to help Horace out. Anyway, now that her money’s back, she thoughtfully gives it to unemployed lawyer Tom O’Connor (Robert Shayne), under the guise of paying for his services. He’d been depressed because his wife Audrey’s (Gail Patrick) salary, not his, was paying the bills. Thrilled, he promptly gifts the money to Audrey.
Amid the smiles, the inside story unravels. Horrified, Horace wants to make up for his unintentional error but, reputationally, can’t risk being exposed. So, his daughter Francine (Marsha Hunt) and Uncle Ed distract Peabody from reclaiming the money, while Horace tries to recover it before either of two things happen: Follansbee returns or Peabody’s patience runs out. But is the nerve-wracking money trail suggesting that his hope is misplaced?
Born in 1885, Dwan knew of fragile prosperity before and between two world wars. When the Depression hit, he appreciated just how fortunate everyone was to get by. Here, he centers the enforced deprivation that millions endured, playfully weighing the fearful tactic of hoarding against the freeing strategy of investing or spending.
The film opens with Uncle Ed and his friend Mason (Hobart Cavanaugh) at a bank. Like nearly everyone, Mason’s hoarding cash. He, too, fears the financial forecast: inflation, disappearing credit, recession.
Ed, however, is investing in bonds to help the federal government keep the economy running. To Mason, hoarding is justified because a dollar won’t do much for a person these days. To Ed, that’s because a person won’t do much for a dollar these days; if people stay honest and hardworking, they deserve to be rewarded. To Ed, hoarding is “mammon making monkeys out of men.” He reminisces, through a flashback, how it was the freeing, not the freezing, of money flow that helped him and his boss years ago.
What Goes Around
Dwan’s characters hold a range of jobs including advertising model, proprietress-in-waiting-turned-waitress, and collection agent. They appear unconnected, but as long as one’s buying what the other’s selling, it could be a service, product or skill, it doesn’t matter who has money. Trouble starts when money is withheld out of fear, greed, or ignorance.Dwan likens money to oxygenation that keeps a person alive. It is through moving, not motionless, blood that the heart pumps life-giving oxygen into (and lethal carbon dioxide out of) the body. Yes, some parts seem less useful. Only, they aren’t. Here, the artist, Francine’s boyfriend (William Lundigan), whom Horace first dismisses as a loafer, is first to suffer, but his one failed art deal in New York sets off a chain reaction that nearly chokes far-off Vermont.
Francine and Audrey ponder how their men, so used to protecting and providing for their women, suddenly find themselves without jobs or contracts. Francine doesn’t agree with those who think it’s a tough time for women alone. In some ways, it’s probably worse for men, especially “sensitive, proud men.”
Geraldine reminds a troubled Tom that this isn’t the first time America has scraped the bottom of the barrel. Economic or financial upheavals aren’t new, she says, “The bottom fell clear out in ‘29. But Uncle Sam always manages to patch up the barrel and refill it.”
For good-hearted people, she hints, it isn’t only money that makes their eyes light up, but what they can do with it: making others feel better because it makes them feel better.
