Marry for Love or Marry for Money
Hands Across the Table is the first of four films that Paramount teamed Fred MacMurray and Carole Lombard in. It's one of MacMurray's earliest film and he's playing what he would perennially be typecast as, a light leading man. That is until Double Indemnity showed just how dramatic he could be.The hands across the table refer to those hands that a manicurist deals with and Lombard is a manicurist. This is the middle of the Great Depression and Lombard working in a hotel figures she can snag a millionaire. She actually does in the person of Ralph Bellamy.
But figuring to trade higher she meets Fred MacMurray who has the nice WASPy rich sounding name of Theodore Drew III. Problem is as he says to Lombard, the family fortune crashed in 1929. He's set his sights on a rich heiress, Astrid Allwyn, who will be able to support him in the style he was previously accustomed to.
Director Mitchell Leisen keeps the proceedings light and airy and its obvious that MacMurray and Lombard are suited for each other on the screen. No accident that they made three successive films, all of them money makers.
Funniest scene in the film how MacMurray scares away William Demarest as a prospective suitor for Lombard. Worth the price of the VHS tape alone.
score 7/10
bkoganbing 10 March 2007
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1615257/35636
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