Watch They Wanted to Marry For Free

Excellent but underrated film

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

Practically every gag from every classic screwball comedy (from "It Happened One Night" to "My Man Godfrey" to "Bringing Up Baby") is ripped off in this RKO "B" bottom of the barrel time filler where a society wedding leads to the bride's sister's running off with a reporter posing as a photographer. While zany characters are essential in screwball comedy, the zaniness of these characters simply isn't at all believable, so totally forced that practically everybody seems like a cartoon character, from the pompous father of both bride and sister to the jail cell inmates and guards, to even a brief appearance by none other than Franklin Pangborn.The wacky sister of the bride (who simply runs off for her honeymoon with the groom, disappearing from the film altogether) is played by Betty Furness who takes the Claudette Colbert/Carole Lombard/Jean Harlow/Jean Arthur/Ginger Rogers character that we've seen a million times (with better scripts) to the extremes, while the reporter hero is the obscure Gordon Jones who carries around a small cage with a carrier pigeon. He's certainly no Joel McCrea/Fredric March/William Powell/Clark Gable, and the situations which get him and Furness locked up continuously are outrageously absurd. It's obvious that the sets are fresh from a Fred/Ginger musical and that gives the impression that it was made on a higher budget, but its barely hour long running time instantly defuses that assumption.

In yet another film about a dizzy heiress, Betty Furness is the heiress who has a whirlwind romance with a newspaperman. Unlike It Happened One Night, the grand daddy of all these heiress films, the newspaperman here is a photographer.Gordon Jones plays the photographer and he like predecessor Johnny Mack Brown of the Crimson Tide of Alabama moved on to the cinema. Jones who is best remembered for playing Mike the cop in the Abbott&Costello show in the Fifties was slim and trim playing at first young juvenile leading men before he put on a little beef and did comic parts. Later on it was discovered that Jones had a really good slow burn technique and a comically explosive temper that was put to good use in films and television culminating in his Abbott&Costello part.None of that is on display here, Jones gets an assignment to photograph the wedding of the daughter of a most reclusive millionaire Henry Kolker. He does that, but also falls for the younger daughter Furness. Of course they have a rocky road, but true love will triumph in the end as it always did back then.Jones and Furness are kind of colorless here which is another reason that Jones moved on to comedy. But Henry Kolker, Franklin Pangborn as a flustered house detective and E.E. Clive as Kolker's much put upon butler really give They Wanted To Marry a lot of verve.

This short film -- one hour -- had a delightfully implausible plot and a few meaningless loose ends, but it provided the laughs. Betty Furness played Sheila Hunter very well, an independent-minded heiress who falls for the "nut," Jim Tyler (Gordon Jones). The story moved nicely, and Jones was so goofy that you knew the conflicts wouldn't last. (In an hour, they couldn't.) E.E. Clive as Stiles the Butler is delightful, as is the young Patsy Parson's as the granddaughter.On an evening for a laugh, it's well worth a look. My wife and I enjoyed it.

An amusing runaway-heiress-and-newspaperman comedy (think IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT without Capra, Riskin, great actors or Harry Cohn), this second feature times in at pretty close to an hour and seems to be all right. Perpetual lunk Gordon Jones is fine as the eccentric newspaper photographer, but Betty Furness can't speak her overwritten lines with any conviction. Indeed, the entire movie seems a bit overwritten, possibly to give the leads some interesting characters they couldn't manage on their own. Witticisms such as "I know a good seven letter word for good-bye: GOODBYE" abound.As usual, the fun in these movies is supplied by the supporting cast, including Henry Kolker, Franklin Pangborn and E.E. Clive. It will give you something to do while the plot is lumbering along its inevitable course.