Not always a bride

Back in June 2025 I did a post on a movie called Always a Bride. Some months back I recorded a Ross Alexander movie called Brides Are Like That. Only after watching the movie did I realize that this one and Always a Bride came from the same source material, a play from the early 1920s.

Ross Alexander stars as Bill McAllister, a wastrel playboy living with his uncle Fred (Joseph Cawthorne) presumably because both of his parents are dead. Ross went to college not to get a good education and respectable job, but to play football. Indeed, he doesn't want to work at all, which makes him a rather unsympathetic character. He's even bought an engagement ring for his would-be fiancée, but charges it to Uncle Fred's account, uncle being rich from his shipping business.

Said girlfriend is Hazel Robinson (Anita Louise). She's the child of orchard owner John (Gene Lockhart) and his wife Ella (Gene's real-life wife Kathleen). They understandably wish their daughter to marry somebody respectable, and indeed Hazel does have just such a respectable person pursuing her, in the form of a doctor named Randolph Jenkins (Dick Purcell). However, Bill is just so charming that he's able to convince Hazel to break off her relationship with Dr. Jenkins in order to marry him.

Bill's uncle and Hazel's parents both have the good sense not to want to support Bill directly financially, although Hazel is able to get her father to agree to a somewhat reasonable compromise: he'll find a job for Bill, and Bill should agree to take it. Bill is just so obnoxious, though, that he basically refuses this, instead deciding to tinker around and work on some invention that will allow apples to last longer in transit. The only thing to his credit is that he really is working on this and has been talking to another distribution company about testing the device, which is a fancy thermos box, and something you'd think wouldn't work.

Meanwhile, Bill is facing increasing financial difficulty to the point that Hazel's parents have gotten her this close to agreeing to move back in with them, unless Bill agrees to take the job Dad is offering him. But we know this is a movie that's going to have a happy ending, and Bill is going to come out OK in the end.

One thing that Brides Are Like This doesn't have that Always a Bride added was the political corruption subplot. This one is more about whether Bill will get a real job. Unfortunately, it's still a subpar movie, in large part because Bill spends the entire movie up until the final reel being an obnoxious jerk of the sort that you can't understand why anybody would want to marry him. A woman would never be able to have a stable life with him, and it's not as if he's that good-looking to overcome such stuff.

Brides Are Like That is decided second-tier material, and even if Ross Alexander hadn't had the personal problems that drove him to commit suicide, it seems clear that he wasn't going to become a big star, but the sort of person whose star would have faded with the start of World War II.