Stop calling us It Happened One Night!

Tonight is the last night for Fredric March to get his place in the spotlight as TCM's Star of the Month. One of his lesser movies is There Goes My Heart, which airs at 10:15 PM ET.

Fredric March plays Bill Spencer, a newspaper reporter (sound familiar?) given the job of finding a runaway heiress and getting her story (sound even more familiar?). The heiress, Joan Butterfield (played by Virginia Bruce) has run off to New York City where, not having any money, she's taken in by a kindly woman (Patsy Kelly). She's a clerk at a department store, and gets Joan a job there, not knowing that the store is owned by Joan's grandfather! As for our intrepid reporter, he finds Joan and begins to write the story, but hits a snag: he finds himself beginning to fall in love with her. (I told you this all sounded familiar.)

As you could probably have guessed without reading the title of the post, this isn't a remake of It Happened One Night, but it sounds awfully close, which is to the movie's detriment. That's a bit of a shame, since the movie has a fairly good cast. Alan Mowbray plays Patsy Kelly's boyfriend living in the next apartment, who is studying to be a chiropractor. Eugene Pallette plays March's editor, and is the sort of actor who is well-suited to the role. And as March's photographer is Arthur Lake, who would go on to play Dagwood Bumstead in all those Blondie movies in the 1940s.

There Goes My Heart hasn't gotten a DVD release, probably in part because it was made by Hal Roach, which would also explain why the movie doesn't sparkle the way It Happened One Night does: he didn't quite have the resources a major studio would have, and was too busy making two-reelers. Still, There Goes My Heart is entertaining enough.