Mr. Chump

I've mentioned in the past how I tend to really enjoy Warner Bros.' B movies, but even they had some that weren't particularly good. One that unfortunately fits that category is Mr. Chump.

Johnnie Davis, fresh off his performance singing "Hooray for Hollywood" in Hollywood Hotel, gets a starring role even it if is just a B movie. He plays Bill Small, a trumpeter who likes to imagine what sort of return he'd get if he could play the stock market, which is a sort of minor genre of 1930s movies. Well, the stock market and trying to beat other people to the punch with a tip that might be skirting the law. Bill has charts and everything that show how he'd have huge returns with his system, if only he had the money to actually invest.

In real life, Bill doesn't seem to want to do much work, and is behind on the rent at the rooming house run by Ed Mason (Chester Clute) and his wife Jane (Lola Lane). Also living there is Bill's would-be girlfriend Betty (Penny Singleton). She, meanwhile, is also being prusued by Jim Belden (Donald Briggs). Jim and Mr. Mason are pretty much the only two employees at the local small-town bank, so Jim it seems might not be so bad a choice for Betty. Mr. Mason asks Bill about his system, and Bill mentions that he gets all of his information from a particular newsletter.

At this point a couple of things happen. One is that Bill gets a chance to work with a traveling band, which might give him some money to pay off his bills. The other is that Mason and Jim both decide they might like to try Bill's stock market system. The only thing is, they get the money by borrowing some of the bank's bonds, which is as always a fairly serious embezzlement issue. And wouldn't you know it, but when other people try Bill's system, it goes wrong, leaving the two bank employees with a hole in the bank's finances and a couple of bank examiners about to visit. It's prison time for sure.

With that in mind, the scheming Jim comes up with an idea to get Bill to be the one holding the bag. He joins the scheme seemingly naïve to what's happening, but he's got some tricks up his sleeve of his own, claiming he can win back the money by going out of town for a couple of weeks. He returns to the news that the bank is about to be sold, which is sure to bring in bank examiners....

Johnnie Davis didn't have a particularly long career in Hollywood, and watching a movie like Mr. Chump it's easy to see why. Davis doesn't have much of a range of emotion, and isn't quite as appealing as Warner Bros. might have hoped. It also doesn't help that the story in Mr. Chump feels terribly old-fashioned. Then again, Mr. Chump was the sort of B movie that was probably never thought about in the sense of people watching it years later.