So Long, Letty

Some weeks back, TCM ran a morning and afternoon of movies with meddling aunts and uncles. I recorded a couple of obscurities that are available from the Warner Archive Collection, and recently sat down to watch So Long, Letty.

Letty shows up near the beginning, just after the uncle, Claude Davis (Claude Gillingwater, whom you might recall as the soap magnate who falls for charming Shirley Temple in Poor Little Rich Girl). He's just returned from Europe with his two granddaughters Ruth (Marion Byron) and Sally (Helen Foster), going to one of those beach hotels in Florida. His plan is to meet his nephew to see if the nephew is worthy of an inheritance, Uncle Claude being the head of a ketchup manufacturer.

Showing up at the hotel is Letty (Charlotte Greenwood), who works there in the spa. Apparently she works on commission as she's extremely forward about trying to sell facials and other treatments to the new guests at the hotel. Those include Claude and his two granddaughters. The granddaughters seem to like Letty, but Claude doesn't.

But back to the nephew. Tommy Robbins (Bert Roach) returns from a day at work to a house that's a mess because his wife isn't very domestic, and Tommy is growing tired of it. And then he finds a telegram from Uncle Claude in all that mess. If Claude sees this mess, Tommy is convinced, Uncle Claude will never give him that inheritance!

Tommy lives next door to Grace Miller (Patsy Ruth Miller), a housewife who is very domestic and takes a bit of pity on Tommy when he goes to commiserate with her. She's got a similar problem, in that her husband Harry (Grant Withers) wants a little more excitement in his life, and Grace is nice but a bit too staid.

Uncle Claude knocks on the Millers' door, finds Grace talking to Tommy since Harry isn't home from work yet, and immediately assumes Grace is Tommy's wife. Good for Tommy, in that this means he's definitely going to get that inheritance. Except of course that we already know Grace is not Tommy's wife.

Mrs. Robbins is about to show up, and Mrs. Robbins is... Letty! Poor Letty knows that Claude isn't going to be happy to see her after what happened up in his suite earlier that day, but doesn't yet realize that Claude is her husband's uncle and that Uncle Claude has that inheritance planned. To make matters worse, Harry shows up and doesn't understand what's going on.

Tommy has what seems like a perfect idea for a television sitcom: He and Harry should swap wives for the duration of Uncle Claude's stay in Florida, so that Tommy can get the inheritance. (The obvious solution would be to offer the Millers a percentage of the inheritance.) Grace is obviously horrified by this, not quite realizing the necessity of that inheritance, but Letty has an offer for Grace. If each of their husbands thinks the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, then perhaps the two wives should take them up on that offer and go all the way to the other extreme so that the husbands will get fed up with the lifestyle they think they missed out on by marrying the wrong woman. Of course, there's the little question of what's going to happen when Uncle Claude finds all this out.

So Long, Letty was made in 1929, at the dawn of the sound era, and as a result is a bit of a mish-mash. Charlotte Greenwood was a star on Broadway, so they gave her a couple of songs, although the movie is definitely not a musical. It's firmly a comedy, and one that's bizarre enough in its premise that it winds up being a lot of fun. Greenwood is a blast here, although some people might think she'd be better used in a supporting role as she was in The Gang's All Here. A little of her goes a long way, and there's a lot of her here.

Even though it's easy for modern viewers to see where the movie is going, as we've seen the sort of material here in all sorts of later works (I specifically mentioned sitcoms because the spouse-swapping plot is something I could imagine Lucy and Ethel trying on Ricky and Fred in I Love Lucy). But Greenwood makes it fun; Gillingwater is suitably dyspeptic; and the "throw everything out there and see what works" approach that characterized early talkies makes this off-kilter enough to be more than worth a watch.