Champagne Charlie

FXM doesn't show too many of the B movies made at the studio during the golden age before the advent of television. One that is currently in the rotation is Champagne Charlie, which is getting another airing tomorrow morning at 5:00 AM.

We don't see Charlie for a while, which is odd consdering the movie is only about 59 minutes. The film starts off with ship's bartender Mr. Fipps (Herbert Mundin) going on about his love of Charlie, who was his former boss for 15 years, but has been dead for about a year. Coming onto the boat are several people. One, Linda Craig (Helen Wood), already knows Fipps although they haven't seen each other since Charlie's death. She's there with her fiancé Tod Hollingsworth (Thomas Beck), who had been a rival of Charlie's for Linda. There's also Linda's female companion Lillian (Minna Gombell) who is there with her latest husband.

Seeing all of this happen from a chair at the side of the lounge is one Pedro Gorini (Noel Madison). He's another man that Fipps knew, and Fipps knows that Gorini means bad news. Later that evening, Gorini calls Linda's cabin to try to blackmail her, and when she goes to see Gorini, she finds that he's already dead. Fipps demands to see the ship's captain about a very urgent matter, telling he captain that he just killed Gorini. Linda shows up and says no, it was actually she who killed Gorini. Cue the flashback, and how we finally get to see Charlie....

Charlie (Paul Cavanaugh) was an inveterate gambler who traveled around Europe with his manservant Fipps. At the roulette wheel at Monte Carlo he runs into Linda who seems to have one of those "systems" for winning at roulette that always seem to show up in the movies even though there aren't any such systems that work in real life. Linda wins a ton of money while Charlie loses. Charlie has a pair of backers, the aforementioned Gorini and his friend Suchine (Montague Love) who are understandably pissed, although why anybody would back a professional gambler like this is beyond me.

Anyhow the backers have a scheme. Linda is an heiress to a copper company, and worth $20 million. Apparently, whoever marries her gets some sort of prenup worth $1 million, with the rest of Linda's money off limits or some oddity. So the backers want Charlie to woo and ultimately marry Linda, with him getting half of the million and the backers getting the other half. Unfortunately, he falls in love with Linda for real, forcing him to come up with some sort of double cross.

Champagne Charlie isn't exactly terrible, at least not by B movie standards. The big problem is that there's a whole lot of nothing wrapped around a plot that's way too convoluted for its own good. I don't know that Herbert Mundin ever got a bigger role than this, and he runs with it for all it's worth. The others aren't bad, but there's just not all that much reason to care about them. Of course, since it's only a B movie, the studio was just trying to churn it out quickly.

Amazingly, Champagne Charlie did get a DVD release courtesy of Fox's MOD scheme, although the TCM Shop claims it's only available on backorder. There was also a British movie with the same title but a different plot which is also available on DVD.