Quite some time back, I saw TCM running the 1938 movie Broadway Musketeers, with the brief synopsis on the TCM schedule making it sound suspiciously like the early Bette Davis film Three on a Match. Intrigued, I recorded the movie so that I could get around to watching it and see what it was really like.
The opening didn't seem like what I'd remembered from Three on a Match. Isabel Dowling (Margaret Lindsay) is a bored rich housewife married to businessman Stanley (John Litel) and with a child Judy. One night they come home from a party with Isabel mildly worried about Stanley's having to go away on business all the time, and talking to his client's wife; you can guess what Isabel thinks that means. Stanley suggests Isabel and the kid accompany him on his next business trip to the west coast. Isabel, still bored, turns on the radio....
The scene cuts to singer Fay Reynolds (Ann Sheridan) singing the same song that Isabel was listening to on the radio. Fay is a well-known burlesque singer. Well enough known, in fact, that a couple of plainclothes cops are in the audience waiting for Fay to do something obscene enough for them to be able to arrest her. Now, since this is a movie made after the Production Code started getting enforced, that's not a whole lot. Fay takes off her wrap to reveal what looks about as revealing as the top half of a bikini, although it matches the wrap in having rhinestones. Still, it's enough, and Fay winds up in jail on $300 bail.
Showing up to try to bail Fay out is Miss Connie Todd (Marie Wilson), who is a respectable secretary, although not exactly earning a lot of money. Certainly not enough to bail Fay out. But Isabel does, and she also shows up, pleasantly surprised to meet Miss Todd. As it turns out, the three women all know each other, because they grew up together in an orphanage. The go back to take a look at the old place before celebrating at a restaurant they did when they were young. At this point, the movie really does begin to sound more like Three on a Match.
The similarity is going to get a whole lot more obvious by the climax. Stanley goes off on that business trip and Fay invited Isabel and Connie to see her circle of friends. At one of these swell parties, professional gambler Phil Peyton (Richard Bond) shows up, and he and Isabel become a bit of an item, which is a problem since Isabel is already married. The two get in a car crash together, and Fay tries to repay Isabel's favor by suggesting to Stanley that Phil is really her boyfriend, not Isabel's. Stanley knows better and divorces Isabel, while constantly meeting Fay and eventually marrying her.
Isabel gets a large divorce settlment and marries Phil, who promptly proceeds to lose the settlment money gambling, and then writing bad checks, which gets him in trouble with the casino owner. Now, if you've seen the movie Three on a Match, you know that Isabel is going to get involved with the trouble, although not by choice....
Three on a Match is a great pre-Code, and unfortunately the sort of movie that you can't really do under Production Code strictures. As Broadway Musketeers shows, you can certainly try, and I suppose Warner Bros. was saving a bit of money by remaking a property they owned, but you're not going to be able to make a movie that sparkles like the original. Broadway Musketeers isn't terrible (although it should be pointed out that the movie isn't even about Broadway, either), but definitely watch the original instead. It's so much fun.
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