May Robson vs. Clint Eastwood

TCM is airing the movie Million Dollar Baby tonight at 8:00 PM ET. May Robson stars as an aging boxing coach who teaches young Ronald Reagan....

Wait, that's the wrong Million Dollar Baby story. Robson and Reagan appear here, but the story is quite different. Robson plays an elderly woman who made all of her money the old fashioned way: she inherited it from her father. Unfortunately, she's just learned that Father made his money the other old-fashioned way, by defrauding a business partner, who subsequently committed suicide. Robson feels badly about this, so she instructs her lawyers to find any heirs of the defrauded man, so that she can give them money that's "rightfully" theirs. (Sure, this is an odd idea today, but back in the New Deal era, stories like this were more likely to be greenlit.) Eventually, she finds only one descendant, a woman working as a department store clerk, played by Priscilla Lane.

Robson moves into the rooming house where Lane lives, and at first, when Robson tries to tell Lane about the inheritance, Lane isn't quite certain what to believe. Eventually, though, she realizes it's the truth -- but there are still other problems. Her boyfriend, played by Ronald Reagan, is a struggling composer, who has a thing against other people's money, money being evil and all that. If Lane takes the money, she's going to lose Reagan's love. On the other hand, that would leave Robson's young lawyer (Jeffrey Lynn) to come in and sweep Lane off her feet.

This 1941 version of Million Dollar Baby isn't the greatest, but it's not bad, either, especially because it's got a nice ensemble cast. Robson is as good as ever, while Lane is more than adequate. The Reagan role probably calls for somebody with a bit of a dark edge to him, which Reagan's acting never really had. Reagan was a great eternal optimist type, but the composer he's playing isn't so optimistic. The bigger problem is the script, which starts off unrealistically enough, and then doesn't seem to know how to resolve the conflicts it creates.

Million Dollar Baby is the sort of movie that hasn't made its way to DVD, and isn't likely to for quite some time, if at all.