Hot Torch

Hot Saturday / Torch Singer (1932) makes a good pre-Code double bill.

Hot Saturday is set in the small California (?) town of Marysville. Nancy Carroll works in the bank, and all the young people like to go up to Willow Springs on Saturday evening for dancing, and maybe some parking. Carroll is sort of going with slick Edward Woods (not the director), although Grady Sutton, the comic relief, does make a play. 

Cary Grant, who is renting a place nearby stops by to cash a big check. He has a chauffeured limo with his high-class mistress in the back, but he makes a big play for Carroll. When she doesn't tumble, he has Woods invited the kids to his place for drinks on Saturday - which will give him some time with Carroll.

On Saturday, he cuts Carroll out of the herd for a long walk and a boat ride on the lake. He is open, honest, and clearly interested. His mistress has left (and Carroll has seen the check he tried to pay her off with), but Carroll still doesn't tumble. She leaves with Woods who also takes her for a boat ride (in a little rowboat), but he gets aggressive, and she has to walk home. She stops at Cary Grant's place, and he sends her home in the limo in the early hours - to the shock of the neighborhood gossips.

In the kitchen, who should she meet but Randolph Scott. He's one of her childhood pals who is now a mining engineer, surveying the area from the old Indian cave. It's pretty clear that he is pleased with the way she's grown up. Her parents were hoping that they would get together and it looks like it will work out.

But the next day, the town is buzzing with the scandal. Carroll is fired, and everyone turns on her. She runs to the Indian cave to find Scott, even though it starts storming. She barely makes it there before passing out from exposure. She comes to with under a blanket with all her clothes driving above the stove. Hm. But it's OK, he proposes and they are going to get married.

But Scott will have to hear the news sometime, and when he does, he calls off the engagement. Want to guess how it is resolved? Here goes: Scott changes his mind and wants to take her back. But Carroll went ahead and slept with Cary Grant that night, and now they are leaving town. They are headed for New York, and who knows what adventures. Whew!

Torch Singer (1933) starts with Claudette Colbert showing up at a Catholic maternity hospital, broke, unmarried and desperate. She has the baby and gets a place with a widowed young Swede - but times are hard, and she has to give the baby up for adoption to the same nuns.

She starts singing torch songs for a living, and does very well for herself. She gets rich and lives a wild drunken lifestyle, although she never forgets her baby. She is particularly nice to a rich, married sponsor, and one day her drunken party drops in on a radio broadcast of a children's show. When the nervous new host chokes on air, Colbert takes over, and is a surprise hit. So she's hired for the gig, and eventually starts to use it to try to find her baby. All she knows is a first name and a birthday. But it's a dead end - the first child she finds is black (this is not played for laughs - she is disappointed, but also sweet and compassionate). 

But she does find the kid's father - a rich playboy who headed for China on business before he realized that his one-night stand produced an heir. He wants to be re-united, but she is not having it. She's happy with her lifestyle and her manager, Ricardo Cortez. Want to guess how this one comes out?

She finds her daughter, and she's been adopted by the playboy. He makes a deal: Colbert can marry him and get the kid - she won't have to give up her life as a singer, she doesn't even have to love him. But they will be married snd raise the kid together. A cold but happy ending.

This movie has a lot of fun with the wild parties and a few songs. Colbert sings Give Me Liberty or Give Me Love, which I knew from Janet Klein's recording. Hot Saturday has some good parties, too, and some star power, with roommates Grant and Scott playing off against each other. But Grady Sutton is my favorite part.