The Richest Girl in the World

Another of my recent movie viewings was The Richest Girl in the World, one of those old RKO movies that's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.

Dorothy Hunter is returning from Switzerland where she's been going to finishing school. She's set to be married to Donald (George Meeker), and she needs the approval of the lawyers handling her trust fund, a bunch of men who have never actually seen her. The approve since they want her happiness, but we learn that the woman who actually spoke to them is not Dorothy, but her secretary Sylvia (Fay Wray). The reason for this is that Dorothy has been afraid to have people know what she looks like and treat her differently because of her money.

Indeed, Donald realizes that he doesn't really love Dorothy and can't marry her, in part because of that money. And that's also going to be a problem for Sylvia, because she's recently gotten married to Phillip (Reginald Denny) and was waiting for Dorothy (Miriam Hopkins) to get married so that Sylvia's work impersonating Dorothy could be done and she could live her own life. The one other person how knows the deception is Dorothy's guardian John Connors (Henry Stephenson).

Dorothy holds a party that's supposed to introduce her and was presumably to announce the engagement that now won't be, and one of the young men who shows up is young stockbroker Tony Travers (Joel McCrea). He meets Dorothy, who is still passing herself off as Sylvia, in the billiard room in a scene that made me think of A Place in the Sun, especially because the two go out on a canoe to get away from everybody else.

Tony falls in love with her, not realizing that this is actually the rich girl. She wants to make certain that he's in love with her, and not her money, so she keeps up the deception in an attempt to prove it. The problem is what's going to happen when the time comes to reveal the deception. That is, if their relationship can even get to that point since you'd think a guy would notice something not quite kosher was going on.

The Richest Girl in the World has the sort of story that sounds like it would be an interesting screwball comedy or a gentler romantic comedy. Instead, the writers decided to have it be a light drama. That, I think, is the big reason why I found the movie so maddening. The drama and the characterizations really don't work. Especially poorly treated by the script is Hopkins, who has a thankless role as a bit of a jerk. I couldn't understand why she couldn't face the trustees herself, for example, and things spiral downward from there.

The Richest Girl in the World is one of those movies that should have received a DVD release on one of those four-movie TCM-branded box sets that Warner Home Video was putting out, say, in honor of Joel McCrea. Instead, it's a standalone Warner Archive DVD that I personally think is too pricey.