I'm always up for a Warner Bros. B movie; as I've said on several occasions, I feel like they made some of the best B movies on average in Hollywood. But even Warner Bros. came up with some mediocre efforts, as I discovered when I recently watched Always a Bride.
The putative bride, if you will, is young Alice Bond, played by Rosemary Lane. As the movie opens, a man named Marshall Winkler (John Eldridge) is at the Bond place talking to her parents and pretty much asking for their permission to ask for Alice's hand in marriage. Indeed, he's already brought it up with Alice. Marshall is a reliable but boring drip of a man, and since Eldredge is billed third, you can guess he's not the right person for Alice. Indeed, while Marshall is downstairs talking to Mr. and Mrs. Bond, Alice is on the upstairs phone talking to Michael Stevens (George Reeves).
Michael has just bought an engagement ring and is planning on coming over to propose to Alice, as he implies in their phone conversation. This would be awkward; indeed, Alice's parents would be very displeased because Michael doesn't seem to be able to support himself, let alone a wife. He couldn't even afford the ring, charging it to the account of the uncle Dan who's been supporting him. Dan finds out and he's just as displeased as Alice's parents about it.
And then the movie turns in a completely different direction, from a romantic comedy to a piece about political corruption. Mayor Loomis is one of the political bigwigs in the area, along with some unnamed county commissioners who, for a movie of this era, are an obvious trope that politics in this area are controlled by a machine and full of graft. Uncle Dan thinks Michael should get a job in the county tax assessor's department, but Michael doesn't seem so sure of it. The pay would be good and the job would be stable, but the feeling that the political machine isn't clean deters Michael.
Some time later, Mayor Loomis is holding a dance at his "political club" (as I said, another sure sign of political corruption). All of our leads are at the dance, and conversation turns to Loomis and machine corruption. Alice's parrents don't like Loomis, while Marshall reveals that he's in on the graft, not that he calls it graft of course. But he gets all of Loomis' contracts in whatever job it is that he does, which is why Marshall is set financially. Eventually Marshall, Michael, and Alice start talking to each other, and the conversation reveals that Alice is more in agreement with Michael than Marshall, leading to her breaking off the engagement.
Michael actually gets married to Alice, although he's still unable to support a family. When Alice's parents give Michael an ultimatum that he either get a stable job of they take Alice back, he takes a job -- running as a stooge candidate against Loomis. Except that he wises up and decides to run a legitimate campaign. Can Michael beat the machine? Well, it's a Hollywood movie dealing with political corruption, so you can probably figure out how it's going to end.
Always a Bride goes all over the place, and none of the places never really work. Granted, it's a B movie, and these were meant to be disposable movies. But it's still suprising how little bearing in reality all of this has, and how charmless the characters show themselves to be. Apparently this is an adaptation of a 1920s stage play that Warner Bros. had already filmed once. There's also a British movie from the early 1950s called Always a Bride, although that one has a completely different plot.
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