Moon Maid

Three-Cornered Moon/Maid of Salem (1933) is a neat Claudette Colbert double-bill, one comedy, one drama.

Moon posits a wealthy family of nutcases in during the Depression. Mother is ditsy Mary Boland. The brothers are William Bakewell, Wallace Ford, and Tom Brown - an actor with only one line in a play, a law clerk who wants to just chuck it all, and a college student with a complicated love life. Claudette Colbert is their sister, billed as the sanest of the mad bunch. Her weakness is mainly her fiancé, Hardie Albright, an unpublished novelist, genius, and artist, who sponges off of her.

When they are together, he talks of suicide, and she joins in, but when she realizes he might be serious, she rushes him to her doctor, Richard Arlen. Arlen calls his bluff and hands him some pills, suggesting he take an overdose.

Everything is going fine, until the bank calls up. Boland isn’t very clear, but it’s something about a margin, and no money in the bank. They are wiped out, and now must go to work. This part is pretty goofy, because, in the midst of the Great Depression, a family of layabouts and dilettantes all easily find work (although not easy work). Colbert lies her way into a shoe factory, and can barely keep up with the work - and doesn’t want to date the boss to keep from getting fired.

But the main source of plot motion (if not family income) is that Richard Arlen moves into the mansion, paying rent. There’s some cute business about the family desperate to get the rent so they can run to the deli for some meat. In fact there’s a lot of slapstick with the brothers running around - I liked it, but YMMV.

Anyway, it’s pretty obvious that Arlen is looking to shake Colbert free from her freeloading boyfriend. And it all works out, as you might guess. This isn’t the sharpest pre-Code comedy, and even Colbert has trouble grounding her kooky character. But we enjoyed it.

Maid is basically The Crucible with a lot less wit and insight. It does have an interesting cast:  Fred MacMurray, Gale Sondergaard, Louise Dresser, Bonita Granville, along with Colbert. We fell asleep for this. Again, YMMV.