Goldie Gets Along

68 minutesCountryUnited StatesLanguageEnglish

Goldie Gets Along is a 1933 American pre-Code comedy film directed by Malcolm St. Clair and starring Lili Damita, Charles Morton and Sam Hardy.^[1] The screenplay was written by William A. Drake, based on the 1931 novel of the same title by Hawthorne Hurst.^[2][3]

Plot

A young Frenchwoman living with her aunt and uncle in New Jersey has ambitions of making it in Hollywood and sand sets out to hitchhike her wake there. Her adventures involve her briefly being sent to jail for stealing a car and taking part in a series of crooked beauty contests. Eventually she makes it to Hollywood and tries to target a contract with a big film director, discovering in the process that the fiancée she left at home is now a big movie star.^[4]

Cast

Reception

Variety magazine, in its June 6, 1933 issue, praised St. Clair and cinematographer Merritt B. Gerstad’s “ingenious” camera work particularly in rendering the “Hollywood scene very effectively though camera angles.” Variety noted use of masks or mattes served to advance the narrative and theme of the picture.^[5][6]

Theme

The characterization of Goldie LaFarge, a French immigrant, anticipates the feminist ideals that arose in the post-war era. Film historian Ruth Anne Dwyer considers this fictional character “an early version of today’s feminist.”^[7] Dwyer writes:

Goldie Gets Along, a charming and remarkable film, espouses female independence in a manner which women of today would herald as unique for American film…She believes in her own intelligence and talent, and happily postpones what everyone else feel she must (italics) want: a marriage to a handsome suitor and marital life in a small town.^[8]

Dwyer adds that Goldie, in her determination to succeed in Hollywood, skilfully neutralizes efforts to derail her ambitions, “battling sexual harassment at every train depot, [doing so] by appearing to pander to, but in fact, outwitting, all of the men around her.”^[9]

Notes

References

• Dwyer, Ruth Anne. 1996. Malcolm St. Clair: His Films, 1915-1948. The Scarecrow Press, Lantham, Md., and London. ISBN 0-8108-2709-3

Bibliography

• Goble, Alan. The Complete Index to Literary Sources in Film. Walter de Gruyter, 1999.
• Tice, Karen W. Queens of Academe: Beauty Pageantry, Student Bodies, and College Life. Oxford University Press, 2012.

External links

• Goldie Gets Along at IMDb
• Goldie Gets Along at AllMovie
• Goldie Gets Along at the TCM Movie Database
• Goldie Gets Along at the British Film Institute^{[better source needed]}