Hard to Get

Olivia de Havilland died at the end of July, and TCM replaced an entire day of their original Summer Under the Stars with a day of de Havilland's movies, which gave me the chance to record a couple of movies that I hadn't seen before, and certainly hadn't blogged about. One of them is Hard to Get.

De Havilland plays Maggie Richards, elder daughter in a wealthy New York family of the sort that would go off to Newport for the summer. Except that for whatever reason, she decides she's not going to go this year, staying behind with her father (Charles Winninger) while Mom (Isabel Jeans) and her sister Connie (Bonita Granville) head off the Newport only to show up again in the final reel.

Maggie goes off for a drive, stopping to get gas at a service station somewhere in the suburbs which is run by Bill Davis (Dick Powell). Bill is an architect who is running the station because he has plans that the company should be setting up a bunch of Interstate-style service areas with attached motels (although there were no Interstate highways back in those days, of course), somewhat like the desert station we see in Heat Lightning. Anyhow, Maggie doesn't have any money on her, simply expecting to be able to put any purchases on a tab or to be able to come back and pay the next day. Yeah, right, says Bill, who makes her do chores around the station to pay off the debt.

Maggie is irritated by this, so she comes up with a plan for revenge after Dad tells her that Bill was right to do what she did. She finds out about Bill's plans for the service stations, which works to her benefit as Dad is an oilman who knows the people who could put the plan into motion. So she gives Bill Dad's nickname as a password to get in to see him, knowing fully well that Dad only gives that nickname out to his closest friends and is going to be pissed to see this stranger calling him by that nickname. Dad wants to know who gave Bill the name, but Bill isn't going to tell.

Instead, Bill winds up going back and forth between Mr. Richards and Atwater (Thurston Hall), a banker who isn't about to give Bill the time of day either despite Bill's increasingly outlandish schemes to try to get in to see both Atwater and Mr. Richards. Bill gets one of the Richards' maids (Penny Singleton) involved, and as you can probably guess, also starts to fall in love with Maggie along the way. She has fallen in love with him first, but it's going to take until the last reel for the two to wind up together even though we know it's coming.

Hard to Get is predictable but still competently made, which should be no surprise considering the caliber of stars in the lead roles. Watching it, though, I can see why de Havilland is one of those people who tried to break her contract to get better roles. After thinking about her time at Warner Bros., most of her good roles were with Errol Flynn, while her other good roles were at other studios (eg. Gone With the Wind or Hold Back the Dawn). Powell, it feels like, is taking a step down into a programmer with a routine plot and a lot fewer musical numbers for him to sing. However, he did get one classic in "You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby".

Hard to Get is perfectly passable entertainment, and a movie that's more than worth watching the next time it shows up on TCM. It got a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive Collection, although it's another of those movies that would be nice to see in a box set.