Uh oh, I’m on a roll with the negative film reviews. You’d expect a super old 30s romance to be pretty fun and get the automatic win but that’s not the case for this one. The characters are just too unlikable so you’re actively rooting against them here. I didn’t think the heroine deserved to win and all of the characters just made such big mistakes for themselves. There’s just no way to climb back up from how far they fell.

The film starts off by introducing us to the Adams family who are really poor and down on their luck. The father has been sick for ages and while his boss continues to pay his checks, it’s not a lot of money. The mother continues to hound and berate him the whole time about how he has failed the family. Walter continues to waste his money on every kind of vice possible so he’s definitely as irresponsible as possible. Finally you have Alice who is really self conscious about the whole thing and so she is constantly lying in order to trick the people round her into thinking that she is wealthy.

She has kept these lies up for a while but then a guy named Arthur shows up and Alice likes him quite a lot. The guy is fairly wealthy and Alice really doesn’t want him to know the truth. As their relationship gets more serious though it becomes hard to hide this. Can she continue to deceive him all the way until marriage or is this relationship doomed to fall to ruins?

So right from the bat I can’t root for the romance here because a romance built on deception is absolutely not going to go well. I think it’s very difficult to come back from that. Yes, everyone starts off with a bit of a mask when the relationship first starts. That’s normal and I don’t see anything wrong with that. There’s a big difference between that kind of setup and flat out lies though. Alice is straight up lying to Arthur the whole time and about fairly massive stuff. The fact that she was lying to everybody about even mild things also shows how she completely lost the plot.

Sure you could say it’s part of her character development but the problem is that it’s clear she would have kept on lying if she wasn’t caught. This kind of plot works way better if it’s an internal decision where she decides to come clean before being forced to do so. As a result this was just not going to work and it’s really cheesy that Arthur was still okay with the whole thing. It looked really bad by the end as it was coupled with her brother being a crook and her father seemingly stealing from the company he worked for. Arthur shouldn’t have turned around so quickly.

I can appreciate a happy ending of course but it just wasn’t very realistic at all. Arthur comes across as a bit of a pushover there. I won’t fault him for being a nice guy but yeah he could have done some things differently there. I will just say I am glad that he doesn’t walk around immediately believing in the rumors though. That was nice because other guys are the opposite extreme in these films where a rumor starts and they are immediately jumping in and buying into it.

Back to the family, Walter was a particularly disgraceful character as he turned a bad situation into a worse one. Actively stealing money is just awful especially since his father is the one who recommended him for the job. So now he’s making his father out to be a liar and someone who cannot be trusted while also incriminating the whole family. In a small town like this that can be an absolute death sentence to the rest of the characters. This guy was not thinking clearly at all.

Both parents were rather bad characters as well. The mother loses a lot of points for constantly complaining about everything and giving the dad bad advice. Quitting the company that helped pay his sick expenses for months and months is crazy and then wanting to burn the bridge for some quick money? She was definitely thinking about things in the short term. Then he takes a lot of the blame for following along with the advice even when he knew it was no good. I dare say it’s almost worse when you’re in that position because you’re ignoring your conscience. At least for her you can say that she thought it was the right thing to do but since he knows that it’s wrong, that’s bad business.

They’re all just lucky that the business owner was so lenient and forgiving. That was also rather cheesy by the way. So the main characters all got off rather easily and I’m not sure that they actually learned their lessons. The weak character cast is what really hurts this film because for a romance film like this you absolutely need quality characters. Otherwise the whole thing falls apart because it’s not like you have big fight scenes or special effects to make up the difference. The writing itself was good despite the characters since I still like the old style dialogue but it’s almost impressive how the film makes all of the main characters look this bad.

Overall, Don’t use this film as any kind of reference to getting a good romance relationship going. Trust me when I say that it isn’t likely to go smoothly if you follow these steps. A good partner will be patient but when it’s someone that you only just met, you can’t really test them to this extent. The film ends up leaving you rather annoyed by the end which is the wrong feeling for a romantic comedy and so it should have either leaned harder on being a comedy to the point of parody or just made the characters more redeemable. Have Alice give some quick little lies out of nervousness which she is forced to double down on later on as opposed to going over the top and even blaming the maid when things don’t go well. She just went way too far.

Overall 4/10