She Wanted A Millionaire

Fox Film Corporation; directed by John Blystone; story and continuity by Sonya Levien; screen play by William Anthony McGuire. United States: Fox, c1932. ...:

The players: With Joan Bennett [Jane Miller], Spencer Tracy [William Kelley], Una Merkel [Mary Taylor], James Kirkwood [Roger Norton], Dorothy Peterson [Mrs. Miller]; Douglas Cosgrove [Mr. Miller]; Donald Dillaway [Humphrey]; Tetsu Komai [Charlie]; Constantine Romanoff [Mond]. [Elda Vokel, Rosalie Roy].

Credits: Dialogue direction by William Collier, Sr.; photography by John Seitz; sound recorders, E. Clayton Ward, Albert Protzman; art director, Gordon Wiles. [Assistant director, Jasper Blystone; editor, Louis Loeffler]. ...:

Drama; feature.

Bracketed credits from xerox of studio records supplied by AFI cataloger.

Editor was Ralph Dixon and Lucille La Verne was also in cast, according to: Film daily yearbook, 1933.

"Western Electric System."

Playing time on release was 74 min., according to: AFI catalog, 1931-1940.

Exit music at end of last reel.

"Passed by National Board of Review."

Copyright: Fox Film Corp.; 2Feb32.

According to publicity material for the film, some scenes were shot at the Goodyear plant in Los Angeles and at various locations in and around Hollywood, in addition to Redondo Beach, where a reproduction of the Atlantic City boardwalk was built.

Summary: "Jane Miller, the daughter of a railroad brakeman, leaves her wealthy date when he attempts to kiss her and then take her to his home. As she walks home, William Kelley, the assistant foreman of the railroad, offers her a ride home on his train, and then at her home, intercedes when her father threatens to hit her with a strap. After Jane’s father is killed in a railroad accident, Jane tells Bill that she must now marry a rich man, if she can, and Bill, who loves her, vows that he will be rich someday. Bill sends in Jane’s picture as a beauty contest entry, and she becomes Miss Missouri. She travels to Atlantic City for the Miss Universe contest, where millionaire Roger Norton, one of the judges, takes an interest in her. After Jane wins, due to Roger’s influence, she breaks a date with Bill, who planned that night to propose, to be with Roger. At 2:30 that morning, Bill finds them embracing, but when he learns that she has accepted Roger’s marriage proposal, he wishes them both good luck before going to get drunk with Jane’s friend, newspaperwoman Mary Taylor. Roger quickly shows his intense jealousy and a violent streak when, on their honeymoon, he hits a bellboy for helping Jane take off her coat. That night, he forcibly enters their bedroom despite Jane’s request that he wait. Although she is happy that Roger’s money takes care of her mother and sisters, Jane is further troubled when Roger tells of his three previous marriages to a chorus girl, schoolteacher and artists’ model, the latter of whom committed suicide. After a trip to Paris, where Roger remakes Jane’s appearance to suit him, they move into his estate. During the next year, he becomes increasingly suspicious of her instructors. Jane decides to leave Roger, but when he reminds her about the payments to her family, she resigns herself to remain with him. Bill, now the assistant to the president of the railroad, runs into Mary in Europe and goes with her to a costume ball, which Mary says Jane will attend. Roger witnesses Jane’s excitement at seeing Bill and returns to the estate, where he gets drunk. Bill comforts Jane when she starts crying about her marriage and confesses that he still loves her. They return to the estate and confront Roger with Jane’s decision to divorce him and marry Bill. Roger concedes graciously, but after Bill leaves, Roger enters Jane’s room through a secret passageway and threatens to feed her to his great dane Baskerville. Jane faints, but Roger is prevented from carrying out his threat when his servant Monk, whom he earlier insulted, appears at the kennel with a pistol. Back in Jane’s room, when Roger attempts to strangle her, she grabs his pistol from his pocket, but before she can shoot, Monk appears in the secret doorway and shoots Roger to death. Jane gives Roger’s money to charity. When Bill tells her she will be going home soon, Jane, dazed, does not respond. ... Variety noted that ’sometimes the tale seems to closely follow the Nixon-Nirdlinger tragedy, with all the elemental points present.’ Included in the files for the film in the Twentieth Century-Fox Produced Scripts Collection at the UCLA Theater Arts Library is a Los Angeles evening herald newspaper article, dated 13 Mar 1931, which describes the above-mentioned events. According to the article, Charlotte Isabel Nash, as ’Miss St. Louis,’ won the beauty prize in the Atlantic City beauty contest of 1923, at which Frederick G. Nixon-Nirdlinger, a wealthy theater owner and ’connoisseur of women,’ was a judge. Nirdlinger, twenty-nine years older than Charlotte and married twice before, sent her to a fashionable finishing school and paid for special tutors for her. He vowed, ’I will make her more desired than Cleopatra. I will make her mind as gorgeous as her body. I will do with a living woman what painters and sculptors seek to do with paint and clay.’ In 1924, they married, and he eventually deemed her ’perfect.’ On 11 Mar 1931, Mrs. Nixon-Nirdlinger shot and killed her husband in their Nice home. Through an attorney, she stated: ’My husband was continually accusing me of infidelity....If a man even so much as glanced at me, he immediately accused me of being the man’s mistress. We often went to the casino and night clubs, but my husband invariably imagined that some man was endeavoring to flirt with me.’ The night of the shooting, according to her, Nirdlinger noticed she was reading an Italian newspaper and accused her of having an Italian lover. After drinking some whiskey, he suddenly tried to strangle her, whereupon she shot him. According to other newspaper articles about the trial, the jury took only nine minutes to find Mrs. Nixon-Nirdlinger not guilty of murder or even manslaughter. The first story outline in the Fox files is dated 27 Mar 1931, only sixteen days after the shooting"--AFI catalog, 1931-1940. ...:

PROGRAM NOTES: "This film, Spencer Tracy’s fifth for Fox, may remind you of Max Ophuls’ Caught (1949), with Joan Bennett in the Barbara Bel Geddes role of a naive young woman who finds herself trapped in a loveless marriage to a psychopathic millionaire (James Kirkwood). Tracy (with whom, a generation later, Bennett was reunited in MGM’s Father of the bride and Father’s little dividend) received second billing as the nice young man she should have married in the first place. Like many of the 19 films Tracy made for Fox between 1930 and 1935, She wanted a millionaire and Goldie were considered lost until the last surviving nitrate prints were discovered in a vault at the Twentieth Century Fox studio about 20 years ago. From these prints, UCLA Film and Television Archive has preserved, in addition to the films on this program, Six cylinder love (1931) (from which reels two and five had already deteriorated, unfortunately), Disorderly conduct (1932), Young America (1932), The painted woman (1932), Shanghai madness (1933), and The mad game (1933). Lacking better source material, we had no choice but to copy onto our preservation negatives the scratches and awkward splices the old prints had accumulated in the course of countless screenings over the years. These are especially noticeable in She wanted a millionaire; but the alternative to copying the battered original would have left us with no record of the film at all. Today’s screening probably marks the first time that Goldie and She wanted a millionaire have been exhibited in Los Angeles in over 50 years"--Program notes by Charles Hopkins. Screened at the 4th Annual Festival of Preservation, July 20, 1991.

PRESERVATION HISTORY: Preserved at the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Preserved from a 35 mm. nitrate print, in cooperation with 20th Century Fox. Laboratory services by Film Technology Company. Funding by the American Film Institute/National Endowment for the Arts Preservation Grants Program, the Stanford Theater Foundation, and La Biennale di Venezia. Cataloged September 20, 1989.

Topics(s): Fortune hunters --Drama. Wife abuse --Drama. Beauty contests --New Jersey --Atlantic City --Drama. Millionaires --Drama. Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.) Redondo Beach (Calif.)

Genre(s)/Form(s): Features. UCLA preservation.

Credits heading(s): Blystone, John, 1892-1938. direction Levien, Sonya, 1898-1960. writing McGuire, William Anthony, 1885-1940. writing Collier, William, 1866-1944. direction Seitz, John F. camera Ward, E. Clayton. sound Protzman, Albert W. sound Wiles, Gordon, 1902-1950. production design Loeffler, Louis. editing Bennett, Joan, 1910-1990. cast Tracy, Spencer, 1900-1967. cast Merkel, Una, 1903-1986. cast Kirkwood, James, 1875-1963. cast Peterson, Dorothy, 1901- cast Dillaway, Donald, 1905- cast Komai, Tetsu, 1894-1970. cast Dixon, Ralph. editing La Verne, Lucille, 1872-1945. cast Fox Film Corporation.