A movie that for some reason sounded familiar even though a search of the blog claims I'd never posted about it is one that recently ran on TCM thanks to the salute to Warner Bros.: The Truth About Youth. As it turns out, I don't think I'd seen it before; instead, it's more that a lot of these early talkies seem to flow together.
The two youths (no My Cousin Vinny jokes, please) are played by a very young Loretta Young and David Manners. He's Richard Dane, nicknamed "The Imp", and is the orphaned son of parents who died quite a few years in the past. He's being raised by a friend of his father's, Richard Carewe (Conway Tearle), who is one of three guardians, although the one who is the most important in raising young Richard. Loretta Young plays Phyllis Ericson, the daughter of the elder Richard's maid. The elder Richard, and pretty much all of the older adults in this movie, just know that young Richard and Phyllis would be right for each other and should get married now that young Richard is 21, much like the Joel McCrea and Frances Dee characters in One Man's Journey.
But a couple of things happen to make this marriage that the parental types are trying to arrange more complicated. One is that Phyllis likes young Richard as a friend, but doesn't honestly love him. Instead, she loves the elder Richard, which is somewhat creepy considering that in real life there was an alomst 35-year age difference between Young and Tearle. But if that's bad, wait until you see what young Richard gets up to.
There's a new nightclub in town, and that club brings in a singer named Kara (Myrna Loy in the vamp phase of her career) who goes by the nickname the Firefly. Young Richard sees her perform, and is immediately taken by her. Never mind all the warnings that she's supposedly a gold-digger who is into relationships for the money that men can bring her. And never mind that young Richard isn't really rich, even though the elder Richard is and if anything has been throwing money away on other people instead of himself. Young Richard gets a meeting backstage with Kara, and lies about how much he's worth so that she'll keep seeing him.
Indeed, young Richard is so taken with Kara that he prettmy much asks her to marry him on the spot. She writes him a letter in which she basically agrees, but young Richard gets extremely drunk and drops the note at home. Phyllis comes across the letter, and this is where the fact taht two of the characters are named Richard comes into play. In most movies, the writers try to avoid giving the same first name unless it's based on real people or there's a plot need for it. Here, the two Richards having the same name allows the elder Richard to tell Phyllis that the letter was actually for him, not young Richard. The elder Richard doesn't realize that Phyllis wants him and not the younger Richard, and so comes up with a way to try to get Kara to end the relationship with young Richard. We know he only needs to wait until Kara finds out young RIchard isn't rich after all.
The Truth About Youth is an interesting little early talkie, mostly for the presence of Myrna Loy. I think a lot of people who are into old movies, especially from the pre-Code era, will already know that Myrna Loy played a lot of vamps and femmes fatales at that point of her career. For those who aren't so well aware of that, this role may come across as a bit of a surprise. And boy is Loy's character interesting, made up n what is obviously garish makeup even though the movie is in black and white.
The movie may also be interesting for its attitudes about relationships in the early 1930s, although as I was watching I couldn't help but wonder what if any relationship the movie has with the truth. The title is misleading in that I didn't feel like there was that much about truth or about youth here. But The Truth About Youth is still definitely worth watching for fans of early talkies.
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