Hiram Maxim

Movies from the classic era of Universal Pictures, especially lesser-known films from the studio, don't show up so often on TCM because of TCM's having to pay for the rights to show them. One old Universal movie that did show up some months back that I recently got around to watching is one that's technically a biopic, or at least about a real person: So Goes My Love.

The movie opens up in 1867 in Massachusetts. Myrna Loy plays Jane Budden, a woman who has been raising pigs but doesn't want to do that any longer. So she sells all her pigs and buys a train ticket to Brooklyn (not yet a part of New York City at the time). She's got a cousin there, and her plan is to find herself a rich man to marry so that she can settle down and live a life of comfort. However, the first man she meets is decidedly not rich, but the struggling inventor who lives next door, Hiram Maxim (Don Ameche).

Even if Ameche and Loy weren't top-billed, you know they're going to wind up together, because of the way Hiram keeps comedically approaching Jane and just coming across as so darn charming, even though he's not particuarly successful and tells her not to marry him since he can't give her what she wants. Hiram keeps it up long enough that Jane eventually asks him to marry her, and they live happily ever after.

Well not quite, and even the movie version doesn't have you believe this. Hiram continues to struggle as an inventor, working on among other things improvements to curling irons as well as arc lighting. Jane bears Hiram a son, called Percy here (Bobby Driscoll) but Hiram Percy in real life. The movie is based on a book written by Hiram Percy, which was basically a series of vignettes about growing up with an unconventional father like Hiram.

Percy is an incorrigible child, and it's his antics, and the way he relates to his parents and his parents' relationship with each other that forms the second half of the movie, concluding with the birth of Percy's kid brother. Hiram, in this movie telling of the story, becomes successful enough that a committee wants to commission a portrait to hang in their museum of advancements in engineering. But the movie ends when Percy is maybe 10.

That's a shame, because as far as it goes, So Goes My Love is an OK nostalgia piece about growing up in the late 1800s. When watching the movie, I thought that the name Hiram Maxim was a real person, and on doing a bit of research, I found out that my suspicion was correct. And that's part of why So Goes My Love is only OK. Hiram Percy's book apparently only goes up to about the time Percy was 12 or so, and Hiram the father had an extremely interesting second act after all this that could make for a much more interesting movie, with inventing advancements to the machine gun, as well as becoming a naturalized British citizen and having a second marriage that may or may not have been legitimate.

Still, Ameche and Loy do a creditable job with the material they're given. It's just that they could have been given so much better material.