B.F.'s Daughter

Another of the movies from 31 Days of Oscar that I recently watched was B.F.'s Daughter.

B.F. is played by Charles Coburn. This is B.F. Fulton, an industrialist living in a posh New York mansion during the height of the Depression. His daughter, Polly, is played by Barbara Stanwyck. She's got a boyfriend who's not quite a fiancé in Robert Tasmin (Richard Hart), who works as a stockbroker. He wants to be successful on his own before marrying Polly, instead of relying on her father's wealth.

One day, Polly and her friend Apples (Margaret Lindsay) go to a speakeasy, where they meet Thomas Brett (Van Heflin, being cast with Stanwyck again after The Strange Love of Martha Ivers). He's an assistant professor of economics who also writes essays and gives public lectures. He's to the left of Franklin Roosevelt (the movie starts about a month before Roosevelt's first election), so he certainly wouldn't like B.F. But Tom and Polly hit it off, and Polly devises a scheme to meet Tom as a theater showing of Hamlet.

The relationship continues to the point that they're going to get married, a sort of elopement so that Tom can go off to a little cabin to write his next book. He also wants to go on a lecture tour, but the bookers aren't about to give prominence to an unknown like him. What he doesn't consider is that Polly has money, and to make her husband happy by helping him to succeed, she convinces the agent to let her back the lecture tour's profitability (without telling Tom, of course).

The lecture tour winds up being a success, Tom becomes famous, and by the time World War II is about to roll around, Tom gets an important position in the Roosevelt administration, something he relishes because it gives him the opportunity to fuck over the sort of person he doesn't like, much like politicians have always done and do even today. The job also comes with a lot of duties that keep him away from Polly.

So she tries to make him happy again by getting him a nice place in Connecticut, but it's here that Tom learns about Polly's having backed the original lecture tour, which pisses him off because he, like Tasmin (who married Apples), wanted to succeed on his own. It threatens to destroy their marriage.

However, this being an MGM movie, you know it's likely to have a happy ending. If there's one thing wrong with the movie, it's that MGM shine, as I mentioned regarding another Stanwyck/Heflin pairing, East Side, West Side. Both leads are good with the material they're given, but the material is infuriating at times. (It doesn't involve either Stanwyck or Heflin, but there was a scene regarding a World War II mission where I found myself saying out loud to the TV that military secrecy is being horrendously violated.) I also found the love at first sight between these two a little hard to believe here.

Still, I think there are a lot of good performances, not just from the two leads, but from Coburn, and Keenan Wynn as a lefty radio commentator friend of Tom's. (It's his radio commentary that violates military secrecy.) That all makes the movie worth a watch, even if it probably could have been better. The movie is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive Collection, so you can watch at your leisure.