Booze makes the man in this B comedy from Warner Bros. Hugh Herbert, most often cast in small roles as comic relief, stars as a henpecked husband emboldened when daughter Patricia Ellis' secret boyfriend (Warren Hull) unwittingly gets him drunk. Before long he's standing up to his tyrannical boss (Clarence Wilson) and helping his daughter marry the man despite wife Dorothy Vaughan's disapproval. A bank robbery, a mistaken arrest and a shocking discovery by the Mrs. help fill out this fast-moving hour. Warner Bros. must have loved the plot, as this is the second of three film versions. The story debuted on Broadway in 1929 as Martin Flavin's Broken Dishes, starring Great White Way newcomer Bette Davis. Warner's bought the play (but not Davis, who initially went to Universal before becoming Warner's top female star) and filmed it first as Too Young to Marry (1931), with O.P. Heggie and Loretta Young as father and daughter. In 1940, they released another version, Calling All Husbands (1940), this time starring Ernest Truex and Lucile Fairbanks. The 1936 script for Love Begins at Twenty was an early effort from Dalton Trumbo, though it shows little of the social consciousness that would figure so strongly in his later films.

By Frank Miller