The Shopworn Angel **** (1938, James Stewart, Margaret Sullavan, Walter Pidgeon, Hattie McDaniel, Sam Levene, Alan Curtis, Nat Pendleton) – Classic Movie Review 4579

The tearful 1938 wartime romantic drama film The Shopworn Angel is a tasty reworking of the old story, with the right cast in James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan to make it work. 

Director H C Potter’s tearful 1938 wartime romantic drama The Shopworn Angel is an extremely tastily acted reworking of the 1929 semi-silent movie version of Dana Burnet’s Saturday Evening Post story, with just the right cast to make it work.

James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan give haunting, superlative performances as the callow and naive Texan army private soldier Bill Pettigrew and the shopworn Broadway showgirl Daisy Heath he becomes besotted with in New York on his way to fighting in the French trenches of World War One. The showgirl is shopworn because she is making hay with a playboy when they meet, but Daisy agrees to pretend to be Bill’s girlfriend to impress his friends, and then of course a true romance begins.

With Waldo Salt’s canny and effective screenplay and the good MGM production, this movie is propelled into the special category by the superb playing of the star team, and that will be enough for all fans of vintage films. Thanks to the vivacious, handsome stars and the polished veneer of sophistication round a sentimental story, this is a still enchanting classic movie.

Also in the cast are Walter Pidgeon, Hattie McDaniel, Sam Levene, Nat Pendleton, Eleanor Lynn, Charles D Brown and Alan Curtis. Charley Grapewin’s scenes as the caretaker were deleted.

Dana Burnet’s Saturday Evening Post story was filmed before in 1919 and remade in 1929 as The Shopworn Angel with Nancy Carroll and Gary Cooper, and again as That Kind of Woman in 1956.

Stewart and Sullavan reunited for The Shop Around the Corner in 1940.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 4579

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