'Bachelor Bait' is a splendid example of the "second feature", with a low budget and short running time yet still enjoyable. This movie's plot contains several clichés, but one of them is subverted in a clever way, and there are several of those great performances by supporting actors that Hollywood studios (in this case, RKO) gave us so generously during the 1930s.
The movie starts off in deepest cliché, with a stock shot of a Manhattan street scene followed by that hackneyed hustle-bustle music that accompanies the opening shot in so many big-city movies. (But at least, just this once, it's not played on a xylophone.) Stuart Erwin plays William Watts, the meek clerk in the Marriage Licence Bureau. There's a clever scene establishing Watts as put-upon by both a big-shot judge and a lowly lift-attendant. This is followed by a well-written scene, showing Watts taking a personal interest in the marriages of his clients. A misunderstanding leads to Watts getting sacked, and there's an interesting line here about Watts being able to buy a pair of men's gloves for 25¢ down and 25¢ a week: was this true in 1934? By the way: Stu Erwin's character lives in a flat that looks much too large and nice for someone earning such a meagre wage, but plenty of movies commit this error.
Deciding to set up a matrimonial agency, Watts places an advert for men seeking wives and is straight away inundated with clients. There's never any mention of an ad for women seeking husbands, but Watts gets a flood of female clients too. Here comes another cliché I don't like: the hapless guy who's been a no-hoper his whole life, who finally takes a tiny bit of initiative and immediately becomes a huge success. On the plus side, there's a really deft comedy performance here by Otto Hoffman as the postal clerk handling Watts's mountain of mail. Sourpuss actor Hoffman could have become one of the great supporting actors, but he was too similar (in appearance, voice and personality) to Charles Lane, the all-time greatest movie sourpuss.
Rochelle Hudson, whom I've always found bland and uninteresting - Janet Gaynor without the sex appeal - is Watts's secretary Cynthia. Here we get another cliché: the secretary who's in love with her boss, but he's too much of a sap to notice. Watts comes afoul of Allie Summers, a gold-digger seeking a rich husband. Summers is played by Pert Kelton. I've always found Kelton vulgar and cheap, with her annoying fake Brooklyn accent. (Or the even more annoying 'Oirish' accent Kelton used in 'The Music Man'.) Here, to my amazement, Kelton plays a character whom I actually found quite sexy, and (this is also atypical for her) she wears some tasteful and attractive outfits. Rochelle Hudson gets to loosen the corset of her good-girl typecasting: there's a nice bit when Kelton's bad girl bitches Hudson's good girl, and the good girl ever-so-subtly bitches right back.
'Bachelor Bait' has lots of that 1930s Hollywood snappy dialogue, but none of it sparkles. A lot of the gag lines in this movie involve a male character being treated like a baby or a woman.
The undeservedly obscure character actor Clarence Wilson gives here what may be his best performance, outside his usual range and flashing his dentures more than usual. Wilson usually played sharpies: here, he plays a district attorney who's a complete dimwit ... because he's a stooge put into office by ward-heeler Berton Churchill. (Churchill usually played respected public figures who were secretly crooks.) Confusingly, Wilson's D.A. character has an assistant whom Wilson keeps addressing as 'Wilson'.
Got room for one more cliché? Watts's matrimonial agency acquires a client named Belden, who's a millionaire simpleton. I really dislike this stock character: dozens of movies feature a millionaire simpleton, but how many such people exist in real life? Belden is even more implausible because he's a simpleton who's a *self-made* millionaire, not some idiot who had the dumb luck to inherit wealth. Belden is played by Grady Sutton, who often played wealthy simpletons and seems to be doing his usual by-the-numbers performance here. But now comes the clever part...
SPOILER RIGHT NOW. It turns out that 'Belden' isn't a millionaire OR a dope: he's actually an undercover investigator from the D.A.'s office. I found this completely unexpected yet totally plausible. The clever subversion of the rich-idiot cliché makes up for all the genuine clichés in this movie. Also, the casting of Grady Sutton is a masterstroke: Sutton played rich idiots in several other movies, so when he shows up as a *fake* rich idiot in this movie, we assume he must be a *genuine* rich idiot.
The weak spot in this film is "Skeets" Gallagher, who plays an implausible character in an improbable way. Plenty of screen actors used gimmicky names, so I have no problem with the fact that Richard Gallagher billed himself as "Skeets". It *does* bother me that - unlike Groucho Marx, Shemp Howard, Nosmo King, Trixie Friganza and other performers with gimmicky names - "Skeets" Gallagher was usually billed with his nickname in quotation marks (inverted commas), drawing excessive attention to the gimmick ... and also drawing attention to the basic glibness and phoniness of Gallagher's screen technique. Gallagher showed up in several good films, but I've never yet seen him give a performance that impressed me. Gallagher's role in this film should have gone to the brilliant character actor Alan Dinehart.
There's a funny climax, in which Berton Churchill's two separate schemes to wreck the matrimonial agency cross each other's croppers. 'Bachelor Bait' is great, and I'll rate it an eight.
