Bachelor Bait

I'm always up for Hollywood's B movies of the 1930s, even if they often turn out to be no great shakes. One that's interesting if uneven that I recorded off of TCM and recently watched off my DVR is Bachelor Bait.

The movie starts off with a prologue of sorts: Stuart Eriwn stars as William Watts, heading to his job as a clerk in the marriage license bureau of a typical-for-Hollywood big city of the early 1930s. A young couple who will have no further importance to the plot (the bride is played by Anne Shirley) are there before hours to elope, while William is right on time, because the boss is supposedly going to fire anyone who shows up to work late. Wouldn't you know it, but William's image-conscious colleague shows up an hour late, and when William tries on his co-worker's hat and cane, William is the one who gets fired for tardiness, which also makes no logical sense other than we need a way for William to be out of a job for the main plot.

Having been fired, William goes back to his apartment where his unemployed neighbor Cynthia (Rochelle Hudson) is mending his shirts. William decides he's going to go into business for himself as a sort of dating service, which is eventually going to be called "Romance Inc." With a little help from Cynthia, William takes out an ad in the paper: men, send me $5, and I'll find you a wife. When William goes to his post office box to get the mail, he finds he's been deluged with enough mail and $5 bills that he can open a swanky office. His taxi driver Van Dusen (Skeets Gallagher) is an out-of-work lawyer who goes to work for William, with Cynthia taking on the job of front-office secretary.

The business somehow immediately becomes a massive hit, which again makes no sense from a logical point of view but this is a depression-era fantasy of sorts so just roll with it. Showing up to Romance Inc. among others is the local political boss, Barney Nolan (Berton Churchill), who wants a piece of the action and is also certain this is a racket. So when William says no, he's not letting a political fixer in on the business, Barney sets about getting his hand-picked DA to trump up a crime. Also showing up is Allie (Pert Kelton), who is the former Mrs. Van Dusen from a brief marriage and now looking for five years' worth of alimony. But since she's an unmarried woman, she'd be a good candidate for Romance Inc. to marry off.

This point becomes important when an Oklahoma oil millionaire, Don Belden (Grady Sutton), writes in looking for a wife. Allie would be perfect for this, while the description of an ideal woman that William describes just happens to fit Cynthia. Apparently William is too stupid to realize how much Cynthia has the hots for him, so it's going to take the rest of the movie for the right people to wind up romantically paired with each other, as well as wrapping up the other plot points in a way that satisfies the Production Code.

Bachelor Bait has all the makings of a fun, zippy little B movie, but as I said at the beginning it's rather uneven. I think that's because the movie really should be a straight-up comedy, while large portions of it feel too much like a drama. The cast is workmanlike if not terribly memorable here. I suppose back in 1934 the audiences would have enjoyed this as a second feature for the few weeks it was in the feature, before going on to the next set of movies to come to their local picture palace. But there's a reason why Bachelor Bait is another of the largely forgotten movies.