TCM ran a night of the movies of 1930s second-tier actress Florence Rice back in June. I had already had Four Girls in White on my DVR thinking it would air that night, but TCM had a different group of movies. So I recorded Married Before Breakfast and recently watched that.
The star here is Robert Young, playing Tom Wakefield. He's an inventor with a girlfriend June (June Clayworth) he'd like to marry if he could get the money. He thinks he's come up with a depilatory shaving cream that would obviate the need for razors, although it does tend to cause some swelling, enough that people might not want to use the product. The company he proposes it to, however, sees things differently, realizing they'd be put out of business if razors were made obsolete. So they offer Tom a cool quarter of a million dollars (in 1937 bucks!) for the rights, with the idea that they won't market it.
In any case, Tom has his money, and in addition to being able to marry June, he can spend some of it on the people closest to him by getting them the gifts they've always wanted. Kitty Brent (Florence Rice), however, is not one of those women. She's a ticket agent at the cruise line, and Tom only meets her when he's booking the cruise that's going to be his and June's honeymoon. It's expensive enough that Kitty will be willing to come around to Tom's place to pick up the check.
When doing so, Tom asks Kitty what she wants, which is to get married. She's got a boyfriend in Kenneth (a very young Hugh Marlowe) who could easily be her fiancé. But as with Tom and June, Kenneth doesn't have the money to marry June. He's an insurance salesman, and along the lines of Glengarry Glen Ross, his boss has offered him a bonus and promotion if he can sell a policy to the milkman Mr. Baglipp (Tom Kennedy). That would be enough for Kenneth to be able to get married.
Tom, being a generous sort, decides he's willing to help Kenneth sell that policy, which I suppose would include paying the first year's premiums if it would help. But this is a screwball comedy and not Double Indemnity, so Baglipp isn't going to get killed. He isn't going to get a moment's peace, however, as he most decidedly does not want an insurance policy. He's done well enough without one all these years.
At this point, Tom gets the ridiculous idea to cause an accident, because this will most assuredly get Baglipp to believe that he does in fact need an accident policy. Yeah, right. In any case, it leads to an increasingly wacky chain of events as Tom hires first a taxi, and then a bus, to try to catch up with Baglipp. He and Kitty, who is tagging along, also get mixed up with a gang of criminals. More predictably, you can guess that Tom and Kitty are going to fall in love despite the fact that each of them is engaged to somebody else.
Married Before Breakfast is decidedly a B movie, but it's a pretty darn fun B movie. True, you do have to suspend some disbelief to think anybody would go along with Tom's zany schemes, but there's not much more disbelief to suspend than in most screwball comedies. Robert Young and Florence Rice both do well in this light comedy, and it doesn't outstay its welcome.
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