The Cheaters

I recorded quite a few movies last Christmas and have been watching them before they expire on the DVR as they only last nine months. While I suppose I could write up the posts and save all of them for December, obviously the time at which they expire from the DVR is well before TCM's December schedule will be known. So I wouldn't know if all of them are going to be showing up on TCM this Christmas. (Then again, some of them, like My Night at Maud's back in August, are only set at Christamstime and not really Christmas movies.) The latest of the movies, which is definitely much more of a Christmas movie, is The Cheaters.

J.C. Pidgeon (Eugene Pallette) is a New York businessman who's fallen on hard times. That's in part because the rest of his family -- wife Clara (Billie Burke) and daughter Therese (Ruth Terry) especially, along with lazy brother-in-law Willie (Raymond Walburn) -- are profligate spenders to the point that they've spent him into near bankruptcy and a string of process servers coming to J.C.'s office. The only saving grace is that J.C. has a rich uncle Henry out west who is on his deathbed. J.C. has sent son Reggie out there to butter up Henry in the hopes that perhaps Henry might remember them in his will and secure the family's finances.

J.C.'s family are about to make his life more difficult. Therese has a boyfriend Stephen who's serving in the Army and is coming home for the holidays (the movie was released in 1945, just as World War II was ending, but was based on a play written before the US entry into the war), and she wants to impress him. To that end, she insists that the family take on a "charity case" for the holidays, as that's what all the rich people do. In the announcements in the newspapers, they read of a Mr. M., who was a former matinee idol on the stage before getting in a car crash that led him to drink, costing him his acting career. Mom loves the idea of having an actor, so they pick that case. Cut to a scene of Mr. M., real name Anthony Marchand (Joseph Schildkraut), renewing his Actors Equity card.

And then Henry actually dies. Reggie was there for the reading of the will, which was a huge problem for the family. Mercurial uncle Henry apparently believed in charity cases himself. He was so taken by one such case, a showgirl named Watson from 30 years earlier when she was just a child actress, that he left the entire will to her instead of his nephew since Henry had the good sense to understand that Clara is a spendthrift. However, there's a catch, which is that Henry doesn't know what happened to Watson, so if the executor can't find the woman in question, the money will revert to J.C. With that in mind, J.C. comes up with the plan to find Watson himself and keep her incommunicado until the "reasonable" period of time to find her passes.

This is where the family's having taken on a charity case might just help. Marchand, being an actor, has access to Actors Equity and can use that to find her. Willie approaches her and says she's a long-lost cousin, and would she like to spend Christmas with the family. Not that she knows the ruse, although Marchand does. Everybody decamps to a cottage out in the country, and the rest of the movie deals with which secrets will be found out, as pretty much everybody in the movie is keeping things hidden.

I mostly liked The Cheaters, even though everybody here is being a bit dishonest at heart. You get the impression that none of these characters is going to use the money honestly and that frankly, Uncle Henry had the good sense not to bequeath it to J.C. and his side of the family. However, the acting overcomes the script problem, and the Christmas theme softens a lot of the greed.

The Cheaters was made at Republic, and because the cast is mostly people who didn't get to be leads in movies at the biggger studios, it's easy to see why the film became forgotten over the years until TCM resurrected it 15 or so years ago. But it's definitely worth one watch. Not as good as, say, It Happened on Fifth Avenue, but still enjoyable enough.