I'd like to buy a vowel

I tend to be up for watching movies from the 1930s, and especially if they star certain actors above others. One person I'm always willing to see is May Robson, so when TCM ran a movie of hers that was new to me, You Can't Buy Everything, I made a point to record it so that I could watch later. Recently, I finally got around to watching it off my DVR.

The movie starts with an opening scene set in 1893, with May Robson playing Hannah Bell, claiming to be the mother of a young child, Donny, which seems ridiculous considering that Robson would have been about 75 at the time. Now, if the movie concluded as something contemporary, ie. she'd have a kid pushing fifty, using her in this establishing sequence would make more sense. But.... In any case, I'm getting ahead of myself here.

Hannah is taking Donny to the charity clinic under an assumed name, he having hurt his knee because Hannah wasn't able to care for him properly. After arranging for charity care, she reads a newspaper article about the Knickerbocker Bank, which has just elevated someone to the office of vice-president, John Burton (Lewis Stone). This absolutely enrages Hannah, who goes down to the bank.

There, we learn that Hannah is not in fact poor at all. She's quite rich, having married a who did well enough in business to leave Hannah seed money when he died, money which Hannah has grown into something quite substantial. But when she was less well off before her marriage, she apparently was in love with Burton, whose parents nixed the marriage. So Hannah has hated Burton ever since, and decides that she's not going to have one cent of her money in a Burton bank. She withdraws everything and takes it to a new bank, where she's more or less the boss because she's got the largest deposit.

Fast forward to 1906. Donny is now all grown up and about to graduate from Princeton, head of his class. Hannah is even richer than ever, and proud of Donny, expecting him to be able to run the bank now that he's a college graduate. Donny, however, doesn't want to go into banking; he'd rather be a writer. Hannah seems like even more of a miser than ever, so a mutual friend of her and Burton decides he's going to try to figure out what the heck made Hannah such a bitter blankety-blank.

Unfortunately, the planned meeting between Hannah and Burton doesn't happen. What does happen, however, is that Hannah and Burton's children meet. Donny (William Bakewell) meets Burton's daughter Elizabeth (Jean Parker) on the friend's yacht, and they fall in love. Of course, they learn about the difficult relationship between their respective parents, and that may prevent them from getting married, especially when Hannah thinks Elizabeth is only after Donny's money.

Move ahead one more year, to 1907. Donny and Elizabeth did indeed get married, and went off to Europe. While they're away, a bank panic hits. Banks like the Knickerbocker bank are in serious difficulty, while Hannah, who has always been more willing to invest only in safer schemes even if they don't bring in high interest. She sees this as her big chance to get back at Burton. They get back to news of the financial panic as well as what Donny's mom did to Elizabeth's dad....

As soon as I saw the opening scene in the charity hospital, I couldn't help but think of a woman named Hetty Green, who was in the old almanac-style Guinness Book of World Records as the biggest miser or some-such. That's a bit unfair to her; Hetty was closer to thrifty than miserly. But the legend of Green's miserliness was well-known in those days, and this story turns that up to 11, not using her real name probably out of fear of getting sued by her children (Hetty died a good 15 years before the movie was made).

The story in You Can't Buy Everything isn't bad, although it does feel like a bit of a cop-out at the end. Robson, for her part, does quite well playing the villainess who has a change of heart just in time, even if she is way too old for the opening scenes and probably a few years too old even for the bank panic era. There's nothing spectacular here, but You Can't Buy Everything is a good example of the sort of programmer MGM was putting out in the mid-1930s. It's definitely worth a watch.