It Pays to Advertise *** (1931, Norman Foster, Carole Lombard, Skeets Gallagher, Eugene Pallette) – Classic Movie Review 12,616

Director Frank Tuttle’s engagingly entertaining 1931 American pre-Code Paramount Pictures black and white satirical comedy drama film It Pays to Advertise stars Norman Foster and Carole Lombard.

Carole Lombard plays Mary Grayson, who teaches her meek boyfriend Rodney Martin (Norman Foster) how to succeed in business – with a great publicity campaign – in this pleasant, amusing, well-acted screen transfer of the 1914 Broadway stage play by by Roi Cooper Megrue and Walter C Hackett.

Pursuing his idea that any product can be sold if advertised well, playboy Rodney is setting up a laundry soap business to try to rival his grumpy self-made father, Cyrus Martin (Eugene Pallette). So he enlists the help of slick advertising expert Ambrose Pearle (Skeets Gallagher) and his father’s smart secretary Mary to devise a successful marketing campaign. They start advertising a product that doesn’t yet exist – 13 soap, because ‘Our soap is an unlucky number for dirt’.

On the acting front, Lombard, Eugene Pallette, Louise Brooks (with only a few minutes of screen time as Thelma Temple) and Lucien Littlefield (as Adams, Cyrus’s biggest competitor) are a delight.

It is a remake of a 1919 silent directed by Donald Crisp and starring Bryant Washburn, Lois Wilson, Frank Currier, Walter Hiers, Clarence Geldart, and Julia Faye.  It is thought to be a lost film.

Paramount Pictures also produced a French-language version of the film, director Karl Anton’s Criez-le sur les toits (1932).

The play also inspired the 1936 Swedish comedy film It Pays to Advertise Swedish: Annonsera!), directed by Anders Henrikson and starring Thor Modéen, Håkan Westergren and Birgit Tengroth.

Little remembered star Foster quit acting and became a director in 1936.

The cast are Norman Foster as Rodney Martin, Carole Lombard as Mary Grayson, Richard ‘Skeets’ Gallagher as Ambrose Pearle, Eugene Pallette as Cyrus Martin, Lucien Littlefield as Adams, Judith Wood (credited as Helen Johnson) as Countess de Beaurien, Louise Brooks as Thelma Temple, Morgan Wallace as L R McChesney, Tom Kennedy as Perkins, Marcia Manners as Miss Burke, Frank Coghlan Jr (credited as Junior Coghlan) as Office Boy, John Howell as Johnson, John Sinclair as Window Cleaner, and Mischa Auer.

It Pays to Advertise is directed by Frank Tuttle, runs 63 minutes, is made and released by Paramount Pictures, is written by Ethel Doherty and Arthur Kober, based on the play It Pays to Advertise by Roi Cooper Megrue and Walter C Hackett, and is shot in black and white by Archie J Stout.

Release date: 19 February 1931.

© Derek Winnert 2023 – Classic Movie Review 12,616

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com