Payment Deferred

Insolvent Londoners Willie and Annie Marble (Charles Laughton) are certain the caller (Ray Milland) greeted by daughter Winnie (Maureen O’Sullivan) will be a bailiff with bad news, and stunned to discover he’s a well-heeled long-lost relative, early in MGM’s Payment Deferred, 1932.

Framing device from the original play, Billy Bevan a neighbor and Halliwell Hobbes a prospective tenant, as we meet the Marble family of London, Dorothy Peterson, Charles Laughton and Maureen O’Sullivan as Annie, Willie and Winnie, in MGM’s grim Payment Deferred, 1932.

After his barely off-screen murder of his wealthy nephew who appeared from Australia, we surmise that broke London bank clerk Willie (Charles Laughton) has buried him in the back yard, his wife and daughter (Dorothy Peterson, Maureen O’Sullivan) in the dark, in Payment Deferred, 1932.