This Month

Everyone wants a piece of poor little rich girl Bridget Potter (Joan Carroll). Her wealthy parents are embroiled in an ugly divorce, and the scandal magazines can't write enough about her plight. To spare the child, attorney Markham (Pierre Watkin) asks his secretary Linda (Ruth Warrick) to take little Bridget up to Lake Mohawk and keep her safe from prying eyes while her parents duke it out in court. Trouble is, while plucky reporters like "Space" O'Shea (Eve Arden) are looking for Bridget, 'Red' Reddy (Edmond O'Brien) is looking for Linda, the beautiful woman he spied while earlier taking a train. Linda's not too happy to be pursued by Red, but when little Bridget foils a nosy detective with the fib that Linda is her mother and Red is her father, will she go along with the ruse?

No less than four screenwriters (Arthur T. Horman, Frank Ryan, Bert Granet, and an uncredited Jerome Cady) worked on this tangled tale of assumed identity, spicing it up with chases, hijinks, and moments of inspired absurdity, like when Red enthralls a railroad dining car by reciting the onomatopoeic name of left fielder "Heinie Manush" in time with the whoosh of the locomotive, creating a mass hypnosis that predates The Music Man (1962) and its similarly syncopated "Rock Island" train number ("Look, whaddya talk, whaddya talk, whaddya talk?")

Obliging Young Lady is notable for containing many early performances from a cast of character actors who never quite became stars, but whose presence added zing to every later project they joined. Edmond O'Brien, a member of Orson Welles' Mercury Players, was too solid and jowly to be a matinee idol, but he could layer a cynical, weathered glaze over everyman roles -- a quality that would serve him well in later noir like D.O.A. (1950) and The Killers (1946). Ruth Warrick, another of Welles' discoveries (she read opposite the director in the audition -- a practice she naively didn't realize was unusual -- before being cast as first wife Emily Monroe Norton in Citizen Kane (1941)) found later fame as the long lived -- and much hated -- Phoebe Tyler on television's All My Children. Eve Arden (a few short years away from her Academy Award nomination for Mildred Pierce (1945)) added her uniquely hard and tart way with a comic rejoinder to exchanges like when, after being urged to quit her job "and marry some substantial dope" she quips back "Why don't you get substantial, dope?" And Joan Carroll, the talented youngster RKO was hoping to groom as their own Shirley Temple after her triumphant appearance in Broadway's Panama Hattie (1940) with Ethel Merman, later appeared in Meet Me In St. Louis (1944) with Judy Garland. Strangely, the same year RKO made Obliging Young Lady, MGM brought Panama Hattie to the screen, snubbing both Carroll and Merman to reprise their stage roles and giving the lead instead to Ann Sothern.

RKO hyperbolically billed Obliging Young Lady as a "fast moving romantic comedy, crammed with laugh-provoking situations, but Variety was skeptical, predicting instead "very little box office value". But a more impressed New York Times praised this film as "ample proof . . . that good things sometimes come in small packages."

By Violet LeVoit

Sources:
Donnelley, Paul. Fade to Black: A Book of Movie Obituaries
T.M.P. "Obliging Young Lady (1941) At the Palace" New York Times, February 13, 1942
Tucker, David C. Eve Arden: A Chronicle of All Film, Television, Radio and Stage Performances
Krebs, Albin. "Eve Arden, Actress, Is Dead at 83; Starred in TV's 'Our Miss Brooks'" New York Times, November 13, 1990