Carter didn't go over there

Another person who was honored in Summer Under the Stars in 2025 was Glenda Farrell. I've seen a lot of her movies since I like 30s films and she worked at Warner Bros. to whose films TCM can more easily get the rights. One I hadn't seen was the B movie Here Comes Carter.

Glenda Farrell is nominally the female lead here although we don't see her about 10 minutes in to a movie that only runs an hour. Also, she's not the love interest for the lead male. The lead male is played the titular Kent Carter, played by Ross Alexander. Carter works in the promotions department for Premier Studios, and has a personal secretary Linda Warren (Anne Nagel, Alexander's real-life wife). She's an aspiring singer, but wants to get to the big time on her own and not have Carter push her.

One of the stars Carter is expected to promote is Rex Marchbanks (Craig Reynolds), a man Carter doesn't like for some reason. So when Carter is informed that waiting outside his office is Rex's ex-wife, accompanied by a policeman who is looking for the alimony payments Rex has stiffed her on, Carter doesn't do what is supposed to be his job of smoothing over scandals like this. Instead, he lets the case go to court, and for that the studio quite rightly fires him.

It takes a little while for Carter to find new work, until he's outside the studios of radio station KLA. Their Hollywood reporter Mel Winter (Hobart Cavanaugh) is a drunkard who doesn't exactly have a successful show, so Carter offers to make the show a success. Winter's secretary is Verna Kennedy (Glenda Farrell). Carter is able to make the show a success, but it's by getting Winter off the show and replaced by Carter himself, who has an extremely obnoxious delivery.

Now, a lot of this sort of show, which I guess was in those days a sort of precursor to Entertainment Tonight, was to run puff pieces on celebrities based on what the studio press agents fed to the "gossip" columnists. Carter, having been a press agent himself, has no desire to do a show like that, and instead has that contratrian attitude, even talking about gangsters and seemingly trying to paint Marchbanks as having an in with the gangsters. Linda doesn't like Carter for this, even though she does get an audition not knowing Carter has arranged it for her.

Marchbanks goes to the gang leader, Moran, and gets Moran's henchmen to rough Carter up in an attempt to stop Carter. But Carter continues his potentially libellous broadcasts about Marchbanks. The stuff wouldn't be libellous if Carter can prove it to be the truth. But can he?

Well, of course he can, considering that he's the hero and this is one of those light Warner's B movies. Tragic Ross Alexander has no difficulty with the material here, and neither does Glenda Farrell. Anne Nagel, on the other hand, is rather bland. There's nothing particularly new going on here, just the sort of stuff you'd expect from the days when a studio had to keep churning out new stuff to keep supplying the theaters. It entertains well enough for what it is, however.