Maybe they should have tried actually being merry

TCM ran a hodgepodge of 30s movies about odd relatives and living situations some months back, and one of the new-to-me movies I recorded that day was The Merry Frinks, selecting it, because the interesting cast is headlined by Aline MacMahon and Guy Kibbee.

MacMahon plays Hattie Frink, the mother in the family. She's married to Joe (Hugh Herbert), a chronic drunk who is a sportswriter at one of the city's newspapers; which one doesn't matter because he's lost jobs from one after the other. They live with his mother (Helen Lowell), a bitter hypochondriac who wants to boss everybody around.

Worse than that, however, is the Frinks' three adult children. Emmett (Allen Jenkins) is a communist lawyer (complete with portrait of Stalin; imagine Hollywood trying to portray a Nazi lawyer complete with portrait of Hitler with such a gentle touch) who loudly spouts slogans and lost his office for non-payment of rent. Then there's daughter Lucille (Joan Wheeler), who fancies herself a singer and has a sleazy boyfriend she insists is going to get her an audition at the radio station. Finally, there's Norman (Frankie Darro), who technically isn't an adult since he still has to go to school but skips every day.

Into all of this comes Uncle Newt (Guy Kibbee), who is presumably Grandma's brother-in-law. Nobody's seen Newt in decades, and here he is on their doorstep with all of his trunks claiming to have been in New Zealand after a lifetime spent in other places that would have seemed incredibly adventurous back in the early 1930s. Newt likes Hattie as the only relatively normal and nice member of the family.

So it shouldn't be much of a surprise that when New dies suddenly, it's revealed that he rewrote his will. In fact, he had spent all that time in New Zealand and the other places, and has a good half million (in 1930s dollars) in stock, which he leaves entirely to Hattie. But there's a condition that would never have stood up in probate court, I think. She has to abandon the rest of the family, never to see them again.

She's happy to do so, living a life she could never have dreamed of before. And unsurprisingly, the rest of the family falls to pieces without Hattie around, and wants her back.

There's a good premise behind The Merry Frinks, but a serious problem. All of the Frinks other than Hattie are beyond obnoxious, to the point that you want them to suffer and Hattie never to see them again. Their obnoxiousness goes on far too long before Guy Kibbee shows up, and he's not in the movie nearly long enough.

The Merry Frinks is on a double feature DVD with Big-Hearted Herbert, another movie starring MacMahon and Kibbee. That one is far better.