Gerald Fielding Movies

A precursor of sorts to the 1999 Julia Roberts vehicle The Runaway Bride, It Had to Be You stars Ginger Rogers as Victoria Stafford, a wealthy girl who has been engaged three times, and has three times chickened out at the altar just before saying "I do." Determined to wed her fourth fiancé, Oliver H.P. Harrington (Ron Randell), Victoria is on the verge of saying those two little words, when suddenly she sees the vision of her "dream lover," George (Cornel Wilde), whom she has envisioned since childhood. Ultimately our heroine meets an in-the-flesh lookalike for her imaginary sweetheart: a no-nonsense fireman named Johnny Blaine, who indeed was a childhood friend of Victoria's. So, do wedding bells finally ring? Not on your life. Though Victoria is ga-ga over Johnny, the feeling is far from mutual -- and besides, there are several reels to go before the end title. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Back at Hal Roach Studios for the first time since 1938's Block-Heads, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy star in the uneven but generally rewarding A Chump at Oxford. The boys are cast as street-sweepers who hope to better their lot in life by attending night school. Fate intervenes when Stan and Ollie are instrumental in the capture of a bank robber, whereupon they are rewarded by the bank's grateful president (Forbes Murray) with an all-expenses-paid education at England's Oxford University. Arriving on the venerable old campus dressed in Eton jackets, our heroes are pounced upon by a group of prankish students and subjected to all manner of practical jokes. After spending most of the night trying to escape from a maze, Stan and Ollie are installed in their "new quarters"-which turns out to be the bedroom of the Dean (Wilfred Lucas). This sort of collegiate nonsense comes to an end when it is discovered that simple-minded Stan is actually Lord Paddington, the brainiest student and finest athlete that ever attended Oxford. According to Meredith the valet (Forrester Harvey), His Lordship wandered away from the university upon being rendered an amnesiac by a blow on the head. An accidental tap on the noggin restores Stan to his aristocratic Lord Paddington status, whereupon he beats up a crowd of bullying students and deposits them one by one in a nearby ditch. Though Ollie is aghast to learn that Stan-er, His Lordship-has no recollection of their previous friendship, he decides to stay on at Oxford as Paddington's manservant. After having been humiliated once too often by his vain and condescending employer, Ollie angrily packs his bags and prepares to head for home, when yet another bop on His Lordship's skull causes him to revert to lovable, bumbling old Stan again. Originally intended as a four-reeler (running approximately 45 minutes), A Chump at Oxford was completed in the spring of 1939, whereupon Laurel and Hardy were loaned out to producer Boris Morros to star in The Flying Deuces. When shooting was finished on the latter film, the team was summoned back to Roach to film a 2-reel "prologue" for Oxford, bringing the film's running time up to 63 minutes. The new footage consisted of a reworking of the boys' 1928 comedy From Soup to Nuts, with temporary servants Stan and Ollie unintentionally wrecking a dinner party held by Mr. and Mrs. Vandevere (played by veteran L&H supporting players James Finlayson and Anita Garvin). The patchwork stucture of A Chump at Oxford works against its overall effectiveness, but the scenes in which Stan Laurel undergoes a complete change of character as the genius-level Lord Paddington more than make up for the film's earlier shortcomings. One of the students (the tall, mustachioed one) is played by Peter Cushing, in his second Hollywood film appearance. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Arnold Grierson (Campbell Gulan) is a down-on-his-luck bookie with only one real asset left -- his attractive daughter. He pressures her into marrying Nevern, a highly successful songwriter who is as unpleasant as he is rich, in the hope that Nevern will provide him with a new source of income. When the daughter finds life with Nevern more than she can handle, she tells her father she is going to divorce Nevern and marry a news reporter by the name of Hardwicke. Fearful and realizing that he must act fast, Grierson plots to kill Nevern before his daughter can go through with the divorce, thereby assuring that she will inherit his fortune. Grierson makes sure he has an appropriate alibi, so that another man is blamed for the murder. Indeed, as long as he doesn't slip up, it looks as if Grierson will get away with the perfect murder. ~ Craig Butler, Rovi

A night club owner under heavy police protection is murdered anyway, and a clever police commissioner figures out that it was her mother, who used a scorpion as the murder weapon. ~ Steve Huey, Rovi

Based on a Mary Roberts Rinehart novel, I Take This Woman stars Carole Lombard as the spoiled daughter of a wealthy rancher. Lombard impulsively marries cowhand Gary Cooper, a poverty-stricken employee of her father. Cooper insists that they live on his income in a tiny shack; Lombard gives this new life a try, but eventually balks and walks. Cooper joins a travelling rodeo, and is badly hurt during a performance in New York--where Lombard is in the audience. Having eaten several slices of Humble Pie, Lombard rushes to her ex-husband's side, and all is well. I Take This Woman bears no relation to the 1940 Spencer Tracy/Hedy Lamarr soap opera of the same name. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Mercurial director Rex Ingram closed out his silent-film career with the British production Three Passions. Ingram's lovely wife Alice Terry is cast as Lady Victoria, who tries to dissuade her sweetheart Philip Wrexham (Ivan Petrovitch) from becoming a priest. But Wrexham cannot forget the fact that he was responsible for the death of a foreman in his father's factory, and he intends to shut himself off from the rest of the world. When it turns out that Wrexham is the only man capable of preventing a crippling factory strike, his father prevails upon Lady Victoria to fetch the young man back to the "outside world." But Wrexham is immovable -- at least until he is galvanized into action when a cad tries to put the make on the beautiful Lady V. Realizing that his responsibilities lie with his father and his family business, Wrexham forsakes the priesthood, saves the factory, and weds the heroine. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi