The Young in Heart

Lisa from Boondock Ramblings is doing the "Winter of Fairbanks Jr." on her blog and I said I'd join her if I'd get the chance to watch the movies.
For today she chose "The Young in Heart" from 1938 which happens to be on YouTube, actually several times, so here we go.

Australian poster (public domain
AUS/US via Wikipedia)

Meet the Carleton family.
Anthony "Sahib", the father, a former actor claiming to have served in India. His wife "Marmy". Their son Richard and their daughter George-Anne, both looking for wealthy spouses.

Things don't look too bad at the French Riviera. Richard is engaged to Adela, the daughter of a former American senator. His father has managed to cheat the senator out of $4,500 at poker. George-Ann has a Scottish suitor, Duncan. Sadly he doesn't have any money, though, so he's not eligible.
Unfortunately, the police finds out about this family of con artists, they take the check back, tear it up, and tell the Carletons to leave town if they don't want to get in trouble. The senator even pays for the train to get rid of them
What now?

On the train to London, George-Anne meets an old woman named Miss Fortune and swindles her way into her first class compartment right away. Hearing that she has a big house and money, the family charms her with their stories.
When the train derails, they help Miss Fortune to safety. On saying goodbye, she asks George-Anne if they wouldn't like to be her guests for a while. While the lonely lady is happy to have found friends, George-Anne suggests to the family they should be acting as decent people hoping that they might make it into her will.
So Sahib and Richard head out looking for jobs or rather pretend they are. Meanwhile Duncan, who can't seem to stay away from George-Anne although he doesn't approve of the family and their intentions, sees Sahib's ad in the paper and comes to the house to tell him of a possible position as a car salesman for "The Flying Wombat". To make sure he doesn't mess things up, George-Anne insists on Sahib taking the job.
Richard, too, gets himself a job sorting mail at an engineering firm where he immediately falls for the secretary Leslie. They get along wonderfully until she finds out about the family's plans.

Spending time with Miss Fortune, however, the Carletons grow more and more fond of her, but none of them wants to admit it to the others thinking they are still after the inheritance.
Also Sahib proves to be so good at his job that he's appointed sales manager of his branch making enough money of his own.
Unfortunately, Anstruther, Miss Fortune's lawyer and a friend of her former fiancé who had left her his fortune, has found out what the Carletons are and advises Miss Fortune to get rid of them. She, however, won't hear anything of it, instead she tells him to draw up a new will with them as the beneficiaries. When George-Anne tells the family about it, they don't seem all that happy, but they still don't admit to each other how they are feeling about Miss Fortune by now.
Leslie and Duncan have already noticed a change in them - Richard, for example, has decided to go to engineering school which tells Leslie he may not just want to be an heir after all.
When they go out celebrating with Miss Fortune, she suddenly collapses. The Carletons wait outside her sick room worrying.
Miss Fortune calls on Anstruther to make sure the new will is signed, but he quite smugly informs the family that there won't be any money after all, in fact even the house will be gone if she will survive.
Now Marmy surprises everyone by saying that they don't want any money and Sahib adds that Miss Fortune will never have to worry as long as she lives because they are going to be taking care of her.

The ending shows the young people married and everyone including Miss Fortune living together in the Carletons' new house - happily ever after, no doubt 😉

"The Young in Heart" is based on the originally serialized novel "The Gay Banditti" by I.A.R. Wylie. I had never heard of her before, but over 30 movies were made based on her work in almost 40 years.
The novel, however, did not have a happy ending, Miss Fortune dies. Test audiences didn't react well to that, so Selznick recalled everyone to film the more positive ending. That also explains why it seems to be a bit rushed compared to the rest of the movie.

On YouTube, the movie is both in black/white and in colorized versions. I chose to watch it in black/white myself which I think works better for the atmosphere, but that's just my personal opinion.

It is a cute movie. Miss Fortune is such a sweet old lady opening her house and heart to the Carletons in such faith that those "hard as nails" con artists simply can't help growing to love her and change their ways gradually.
That she doesn't even lose her faith in them upon hearing about their plans, makes you think she's either very naive or she sees something in them that they only just now start to see themselves, but can't even admit to one another.

I really like the performances, too - although I have to admit that Marmy sometimes got on my nerves a bit, but that has more to do with her lines than the performance.
There's only one thing I can't seem to agree on with other viewers, if they mentioned him at all, that is. I absolutely hated the character of Duncan, right from the start, and that didn't just have to do with the terrible Scottish accent (rolling the r is not enough!). When he called Adela "very ugly and very stupid", he had lost me. She may have been a naive young lady, but putting a pair of glasses on a pretty girl doesn't make her very ugly and it doesn't make her plain as I read elsewhere, and I'm not just saying that because I wear glasses myself. I told myself that this was a 1938 stereotype, but he kept being rude and condescending throughout the movie. I think the only scene I thought he was okay was when he apologized to Miss Fortune for getting Richard drunk.
This paragraph being so long, tells you how much I despised him 😂 I wonder if he was the same in the novel and if the two marriages were even mentioned.

I think I liked Miss Fortune best of them all. She really has a few very sweet scences, for example when she cares for the drunk Richard telling him she has been intoxicated herself before and how someone with a little puppy helped her then which makes him go and look for the perfect puppy for her - just to ingratiate himself with her of course, at least he still thinks so himself at the time.

A short word on the Flying Wombat, an amazingly futuristic car which was "played" by the "Phantom Corsair", a prototype automobile which never went into production after the designer died in a car accident in 1939.
The car is now in the National Automobile Museum in Reno.
I don't drive and not that many cars can get me excited, but this is a real beauty.

If you don't know the movie yet and want to watch it, I'm sorry if I told you too much, but it's still worth it, promise!

The next two weeks I won't be able to join in as I don't have a way to watch the chosen movies, but I'll be back the week after that.