One Sunday Afternoon ** (1933, Gary Cooper, Frances Fuller, Fay Wray, Neil Hamilton) – Classic Movie Review 12,478

Director Stephen Roberts’s 1933 Paramount Pictures black and white film One Sunday Afternoon is a fairly charming and pleasing, conscientiously handled, sentimental comedy-drama.

The young Gary Cooper is on good early form as Biff Grimes, a jilted 1900s small-town dentist who thinks he has picked the wrong wife in lovely, affectionate Amy Lind Grimes (Frances Fuller). He still carries a torch for his old flame Virginia Brush (Fay Wray) whom he lost to his old friend Hugo Barnstead (Neil Hamilton), who betrayed him and married her. Hugo comes to see Grimes for a dental emergency and their story is told in flashback.

It is based on James Hagan’s Broadway hit play, and remade twice by Raoul Walsh, first as The Strawberry Blonde with James Cagney in 1941 and then as the musical One Sunday Afternoon in 1948.

The cast are Gary Cooper, Frances Fuller, Fay Wray, Neil Hamilton. Roscoe Karns, Jane Darwell, Clara Blandick, Sam Hardy, Harry Schultz, James Burtis, A S Byron, Jack Clifford, and Johnny St Clair.

It was released on September 1, 1933.

Weirdly, was a notorious flop as the only Cooper film of this period to lose money at the box office.

Before making The Strawberry Blonde, Jack L Warner screened the 1933 film and then wrote a memo to his production head Hal B Wallis telling him to watch it: “It will be hard to stay through the entire running of the picture, but do this so you will know what not to do.’

James Hagan’s play One Sunday Afternoon, starring Lloyd Nolan, ran on Broadway from February 15 1933 to November 1933, so it was still running when the film came out.

One Sunday Afternoon is written by William Slavens McNutt and Grover Jones, based on the 1933 play One Sunday Afternoon by James Hagan, is produced by Louis D Lighton, is shot by Victor Milner and Karl Struss, and scored by John Leipold.

© Derek Winnert 2023 – Classic Movie Review 12,478

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