Lady for a Day **** (1933, Warren William, May Robson, Guy Kibbee, Jean Parker, Glenda Farrell) – Classic Movie Review 2610

Co-writer/producer/director Frank Capra’s 1933 classic is a timeless tearjerker about Apple Annie, a poor Times Square apple-saleswoman (May Robson) who is transformed into a lady for a day by racketeer Dave the Dude (Warren William) in order to fool her visiting daughter. It is the first film for which Capra received an Academy Award nomination for Best Director.

Apple Annie is the architect of her own difficulties as she has always written to her daughter in Spain that she is a member of New York’s high society. And now her daughter is on the way to America with her new fiancé and his father, a member of Spain’s aristocracy. Dave the Dude, who considers Annie his good luck charm, gets for her a luxury apartment to entertain the visitors.

Jean Parker plays Louise, who has been raised in a Spanish convent since she was an infant, believing her mother is a society matron named Mrs E. Worthington Manville who lives at the Hotel Marberry.

Glenda Farrell plays nightclub owner Missouri Martin, Dave’s girlfriend who helps transform Annie from a dowdy street peddler into an elegant dowager.

Capra tells in his autobiography how he and his fellow writer Robert Riskin took a 1929 Damon Runyon story called Madame La Gimp and ‘banged out a hopefully warm, funny script about Apple Annie, a filthy, drunken, apple-selling harridan who bossed the beggars of Times Square’. He then went to his Columbia studio boss Harry Cohn to get him to ask MGM boss Louis B Mayer to borrow his contract actress, Marie Dressler, the one major veteran female movie star of the day.

Cohn said: ‘The world’s lousy with old dames, go dig one up!’ So Capra dug up 75-year-old stage star Robson, and ‘that grand old lady was as humble and excited as someone subbing for the star’. When she boomed in a stage voice, Capra implored her: ‘Try the lines in a hoarse whisper so the detectives won’t hear you’. And he found ‘she was perfect’.

Now, more than eight decades later, ‘perfect’ is still a fitting description of both Robson’s casting and performance and this lovely, charming, heartfelt comedy.

Also in the cast are Guy Kibbee, Ned Sparks, Walter Connolly, Nat Pendleton, Barry Norton, Robert Emmett O’Connor, Wallis Clark, Hobart Bosworth and Halliwell Hobbes.

Remake: Pocketful of Miracles. Sequel: Lady by Choice in 1934.

At the Oscars it was an also ran, with four nominations and no wins. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Film but lost to Cavalcade. Robson was nominated Best Actress but lost to Katharine Hepburn in Morning Glory, and Robert Riskin lost the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay to Sarah Y. Mason and Victor Heerman for Little Women.

Will Rogers presented the Academy Award for Best Director, and when he opened the envelope he simply announced, ‘Come up and get it, Frank!’, Capra, certain he was the winner, ran to the podium to collect his Oscar, only to discover Rogers had meant Frank Lloyd, who won for Cavalcade.

It was restored in 2001, and the Blu-ray edition incorporates four and a half minutes of lost footage.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2610

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