Three blind mice - 1938

Very nice :-) I really liked it. Very old too, but it’s worth to bear with it. I love David Niven and here he’s a dashing young man of 28, very charming :-) The story is very similar to ‘how to marry a millionaire’, very similar indeed, basically the same. The three Charters sisters take all the money they have, the 5872$ they inherited, and move to California intending to find a rich husband for Pam. Moira and Liz are not so keen on the idea, but Pam wants to try and find a better life, marrying a rich husband. She checks into a hotel introducing her sisters as her maid Moira and her secretary Elizabeth.  Soon after, she meets Steve and Van, and they compete for her attention, both charmed by her. Pam chooses Van, because she actually fell in love with him. Because of this, her love, she confesses to him right after the marriage proposal. She hopes that won’t make any difference between them, but he says it does! She never expected to hear that he had been doing the same thing, trying to find a rich wife for himself because he hasn’t got a dime to his name…

She says it doesn’t matter, they love each other… but he insists that she should marry a rich man like she intended to do, and basically throws her into Steve’s arms.

Pam accepts Steve’s marriage proposal, but then talks too freely to her sisters not knowing that Mike the waiter was in the room, to see Moira. When Mike learns that they were gold-diggers, he gets very angry and wants to tell everything to Steve, so they lock him in the bathroom and run away.

Steve takes them to his ranch to meet his sister Miriam, a very free-spirited woman, like only the rich can be and get away with it.

One night when they’re all out celebrating, Miriam picks up a man at the bar: Van Dam. He can’t stop loving Pam, and it’s obvious that she loves him too but says nothing because after all he turned her away.

We only get a couple of short scenes to see how Steve actually gets along much better with Liz than with Pam. 

At the end, Van goes to Pam’s room and they make peace and confess they do love each other. Steve comes in to see them kissing, and Pam explains it all to him, both her scheme to find a rich husband and her falling in love with poor Van. She also tells him very innocently that it was all her idea, that her sisters were dead against it, specially Liz, and Steve understands clearly what was that troubled him, and goes to propose to Liz instead!

He finds her screaming and running out of her room:  she runs right into his arms “this is no way to behave and I’m trying to ask you a very simple question, will you marry me?” - “yes, but there’s a man in my room” … which is all very nice that she loves him too, but we didn’t get to see her falling for him, and how she can take it so simply… the shock I imagine. “a man huh? strange, every girl I ask to marry me has a man in her room” . 

They look around and finally see Mike hiding there; he had been trying to go to Moira’s room, because they got married the day before! It turns out Mike is a rich man and has a big ranch in Montana. At the end, both Liz and Moira found love, and a rich husband, and Pam was the only one to fall in love with a poor man, but they’re all equally happy.

 “everybody but me” says Miriam :-p 

One thing could have made it better I think. We follow exclusively Pam, when it would have been interesting to follow the others too, to see how Moira dealt with losing Mike whom she loved, and how Liz felt about it all, when did she know she was in love, how she felt about being in love with her sister’s fiancée, and all that. It would have been nice indeed.

Pamela Charters - Loretta Young

Van Dam Smith - Joel McCrea

Steve Harrington - David Niven

Mike Brophy - Stuart Erwin

Moira Charters - Marjorie Weaver

Elizabeth Charters - Pauline Moore

Miriam - Binnie Barnes