EXPENSIVE HUSBANDS (1937)

Laurine (Beverly Roberts) is an actress undergoing a downswing in her career. We meet her at a polo game with her agent (Allyn Joslyn) where she presents the winner, her friend Ricky (Gordon Oliver), with a trophy. She then decides to leave Hollywood and take a bit of a vacation in Vienna, hoping to attract enough new attention to land a film. At her hotel, a handsome waiter named Rupert (Patric Knowles) takes a shine to her but muddies his water a bit when he tells her that he can see from her performances that she's never really been in love. He mentions that he needs 200 shillings and she leaves him a tip in that amount. Later, Joe shows up advising her to marry a count as that strategy has worked for an actress who got a role that Laurine wanted. They place what amounts to a want ad looking for a marriage of convenience with a count, and who turns up but Rupert, a count who, like Laurine, is apparently down on his luck. He's hired, getting a lump sum of money and a regular allowance as long as they're married, with no other obligations. Of course, this being a romantic comedy, they start to actually care for each other, but she wants to return to Hollywood to make a movie and he wants her to stay in Vienna and give up her career. She makes the movie and during a publicity tour, Rupert shows up. It turns out that he actually doesn't need her money; he needed the 200 shillings to pay off his debts to meet the conditions of a will that left him a fortune. But two engage in deceitful behavior for a while before truths come out and things get settled in standard romantic comedy fashion.

One IMDb reviewer notes that this Warner Bros. B-movie, a screwball comedy wannabe, feels like a low-rent version of a frothy comedy that Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland probably turned down. The script is mostly OK, though the complications are not terribly believable. Knowles (who would appear with both Flynn and de Havilland in ROBIN HOOD the next year) is the best thing in the movie. He's handsome and charming and always has a smile of some kind, goofy or otherwise, on his face, and he's just right for the role. Roberts, on the other hand, is not very good. She's bland and unable to inhabit the character, and the two don't have much chemistry. She does get a good line, however; when asked to speak up, she says, "If I spoke my thoughts, the censors would cut them out." Joslyn and Oliver are both fine, though their roles are fairly unimportant, especially Oliver's—he is introduced as a possible major character, but mostly vanishes after the first scenes. Knowles made me want to like this but I couldn't work up much enthusiasm for the characters. Pictured are Roberts and Knowles. [TCM]