Angel's Holiday (1937)

1937's "Angel's Holiday" helped cement Jane Withers' position as Fox's second biggest box office child star after Shirley Temple, which she held for two years. Jane's Angel is the daughter of famed mystery writer Waldo Everett (John Qualen), naturally involving herself in a real life puzzle involving movie star Pauline Kaye (Sally Blane), her disappearance a publicity stunt engineered by her manager, and racketeer Bat Regan (Harold Huber), who gets in on the action by tailing Angel. Not one of the star's better vehicles, though she does her impression of Martha Raye, then bamboozles the entire police force to free Pauline's cohort in mischief (Frank Jenks). Billed on screen as Regan's top henchman Eddie is Lon Chaney (entering at the 46 minute mark), still fairly new to 20th Century-Fox, his two year stint under contract yielding little in the way of featured roles; he appears in two further Jane Withers pictures in the coming months, "Wild and Woolly" and "Checkers," both an improvement on this one. One scene finds him cleaning his gat at the breakfast table, to which Bat Regan has a comment: "ain't you got any better etiquette than to be cleaning your rod at the table? Eddie's always in a bad mood before he has his breakfast, he's liable to pull a gun on himself!" Later on Chaney bullies Joan Davis: "hey, what do you think you are?" "what do I look like?" "you couldn't be that!"