With upwards of fifty films a year needed to fill their theater chains, each major studio recycled stories to keep the production line moving, resulting in many unacknowledged remakes. 1938's Broadway Musketeers is a more lighthearted, less risqué ; updating of the impressive 1932 pre-Code sizzler Three on a Match, which starred Joan Blondell, Ann Dvorak and Bette Davis. Three schoolgirl friends take different paths in life but vow to meet yearly and aid each other, like the Three Musketeers. The outwardly stable married friend abandons her husband to be with a gangster, threatening her child. The other two band together to help her. The story changes imposed on the remake show the content that concerned the Production Code. In the second version the wayward wife's drug use is dropped entirely, and moral judgments on wrongdoing are more strongly emphasized. Unlike the first film's more open future for the three women, dedication to a marriage is seen as the only proper path. The singer Fay (Ann Sheridan) and stenographer Connie (Marie Wilson) still cannot save the rich runaway wife Isabel (Margaret Lindsay), but her fate this time around is less a sacrifice than a punishment. The remake also finds time for Ann Sheridan to sing two songs. Critics complimented Broadway Musketeers' fast pace and snappy characterizations. They saved special praise for director John Farrow, who for four years had been impressing studio heads with his visual precision and technical ability, yet had not broken through the barrier to front-rank productions.

By Glenn Erickson