mark.waltz Whether or not money can buy happiness (or just rents it) is a question still being pondered millenniums after the appearance of the first gold diggers. Today, having tons of money may get your name in the paper or most likely just pay for a good therapist, but in the depression, if you were lucky enough not to have lost your shirt or skirt in the stock market, you had to wonder if the broke heir or heiress or the dashing young man or sexy chorus girl was after you or your bank roll. Real life heiresses Barbara Hutton and Doris Duke had their prestigious but sometimes lonely lives documented in T.V. movies, even appearing together as pals in the 2001 Doris Duke bio, "Too Rich".Their fictional depression era movie counterpart is introduced as the orphaned daughter of wealthy parents who went down on the Titanic, and to avoid unwanted publicity, she has lived in seclusion all her life. The audience learns early on in this light screwball comedy with dramatic moments that the real heiress (Miriam Hopkins) has switched places with her secretary (Fay Wray) in the hopes of finding a husband who loves her, not her status or bank account. She's actually a very lovely young lady, fun and caring, yet definitely insecure over her ability to attract a man. Along comes handsome Joel McCrea who makes a bee-line for Wray but also enjoys spending time with Hopkins whom he considers a "buddy". Wray goes along for the prank, yet unlike in the badly remade "Bride By Mistake", is always prepared to relinquish her status should the plan backfire.A well-written and complex comedy, this is a film without a real complete conclusion, but that gives the audience the opportunity to determine how they would like the revelation of the truth to come out. Hopkins and McCrea share a nice chemistry and prove that true love does usually start off with the two being more pals than lovers. Wray's character is never really developed beyond just being an agreeable part of the scheme, but Henry Stephenson is excellent as Hopkins' adviser. Droll Reginald Denny and loyal Beryl Mercer round out the supporting cast for a comedy that doesn't answer all the questions about what it takes to be a happy rich person, but then that answer needs to come from the person whose life desire it is to be wealthy.

VLeung I came to this film because I'd just seen its musical remake, The French Line, a campy colour affair with Jane Russell, 'presented by' Howard Hughes. The French Line isn't unwatchable, although one may want to peep through one's fingers during the cowgirl dance number, but it is outstandingly dated in terms of male-female relations. Jane Russell's richest-girl-in-the-world is warned from the start that she will put men off with her rootin' tootin' tomboyish get-up & behaviour, but it's her money and power that will really convince them she's wearing the pants.I am mad about Joel McCrea and I like Hopkins a lot. I wanted to see what the original was like. And of course, because it's the 30s there's no such issue. Men and women can be knockabout pals, Joel McCrea is enchanted when Hopkins thrashes him at billiards, they get drunk together, fall asleep smoochily together and the happy ending is wonderfully engineered: you relax your modern PC concerns even though the penultimate scene features McCrea picking her up (protesting wildly) and (off-camera) locking her in his car. It squeaked into cinemas pre-Hays, too, so the last couple of scenes in particular are pretty racy and very funny. The two leads play beautifully together and Fay Wray is always good.

bkoganbing The Richest Girl in the World in 1934 meant Barbara Hutton. Her exploits made her the Paris Hilton of the day. Did anyone seriously think that by titling the lead character Dorothy Hunter that RKO wasn't trying to cash in on Hutton's reputation?Miriam Hopkins as Dorothy Hunter is naturally concerned with both privacy and wanting to know if she would really be marrying someone for love. She's hatched a scheme with her secretary Fay Wray to in public exchange identities. But that may come to an end soon as Fay is looking to marry Reginald Denny.But along comes Joel McCrea who's got his own ideas about supporting himself in the true McCrea tradition. Hopkins crushes out on him big time and he falls for her thinking she's the secretary.I can't say more, but any movie fan can take this plot from here. Still the leads are at their best and the film is good entertainment.But who was RKO kidding?

James Hitchcock Mistaken identity has always been a classic theme of comedy; many comic characters in Shakespeare or Moliere, for example, disguise themselves as somebody else, but the device is even older, dating back at least to the days of the Greek and Roman theatre. The advantage of this device is that it enables the dramatist to make the most of the ensuing confusion for humorous purposes. The plot of 'The Richest Girl in the World' is one with which classical dramatists would have felt at home. The central character is Dorothy Hunter, the heiress to a large fortune. (The similarity of surnames suggests that the model for Dorothy may have been the Woolworths heiress Barbara Hutton). She is worried that potential suitors will love her for her money and not for herself. She therefore changes places with her attractive secretary Sylvia. If any man shows an interest in the supposed 'Sylvia' (who is really Dorothy in disguise), she suggests to him that the supposed 'Dorothy' (really Sylvia in disguise) has fallen in love with him and would welcome a proposal of marriage. The real Sylvia is happily married and has no interest in any of Dorothy's suitors; the point of this charade is that if the man shows any interest in the fake 'Dorothy' he has thereby failed the test and proved himself unworthy of the real Dorothy's hand. The film chronicles Dorothy's attempts to play this trick on her latest beau, Tony.This plot could have been the basis of an intriguing comedy, but it is not really developed well enough. This is less the fault of the actors than of the script. In this age of the turgid three-hour blockbuster it seems strange to criticise a film for being too short, but an hour and ten minutes were not sufficient to bring out all the comic possibilities of the situation, and the conclusion of the film is both rushed and muddled. (Perhaps the film was originally the B-movie in a double bill with a set, and limited, running-time, which would explain the scriptwriter's haste to get everything tidied up as soon as possible.) Dorothy's elderly guardian, Jonathan, does suggest that she may be guilty of psychological cruelty in pushing her deception of Tony so far, but the film makes no attempt to explore the deeper implications of her behaviour. Her wealth is, after all, an important part of her identity, so by posing as her own secretary she has effectively persuaded Tony to fall in love with her under false pretences. The film, however, prefers to ignore the philosophical implications of this deception. Like many comedies of the period, this is a light film, in the sense that it is lighthearted but also in the sense that it is lightweight. Even in the era when it was made, it was probably seen as no more than an amusing trifle. It has not stood the test of time well, and today comes across as trivial and faded. 5/10