They Wanted to Marry (1937)

In yet another film about a dizzy heiress, Betty Furness is the heiress who has a whirlwind romance with a newspaperman. Unlike It Happened One Night, the grand daddy of all these heiress films, the newspaperman here is a photographer.

Gordon Jones plays the photographer and he like predecessor Johnny Mack Brown of the Crimson Tide of Alabama moved on to the cinema. Jones who is best remembered for playing Mike the cop in the Abbott&Costello show in the Fifties was slim and trim playing at first young juvenile leading men before he put on a little beef and did comic parts. Later on it was discovered that Jones had a really good slow burn technique and a comically explosive temper that was put to good use in films and television culminating in his Abbott&Costello part.

None of that is on display here, Jones gets an assignment to photograph the wedding of the daughter of a most reclusive millionaire Henry Kolker. He does that, but also falls for the younger daughter Furness. Of course they have a rocky road, but true love will triumph in the end as it always did back then.

Jones and Furness are kind of colorless here which is another reason that Jones moved on to comedy. But Henry Kolker, Franklin Pangborn as a flustered house detective and E.E. Clive as Kolker's much put upon butler really give They Wanted To Marry a lot of verve.