The Young in Heart

United States

1938

90 Min

Color

English

Currently 3.7/5 Stars.
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SCR Paul Osborn, Charles Bennett, I.A.R. Wylie

CAST Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Roland Young, Janet Gaynor, Billie Burke, Paulette Goddard, Minnie Dupree, Richard Carlson, Henry Stephenson, Lawrence Grant, Walter Kingsford, Eily Malyon

PROD DES William Cameron Menzies, Lyle R. Wheeler

MUSIC Franz Waxman, Heinz Roemheld

An inexplicably neglected film from producer David Selznick, The Young in Heart (1938) was Janet Gaynor’s last film before she retired from the screen to marry MGM costume designer Adrian (Gaynor made one last big screen appearance in 1959’s Bernardine, starring Pat Boone). In The Young in Heart, Gaynor plays the daughter in a family of con artists, the Carletons, who meet a sweet old lady, Miss Ellen Fortune (Minnie Dupree), on a train. At loose ends after being driven out of Monte Carlo, the family learns that Miss Fortune is rich, and sets out to bilk her, moving into her London home. To allay her lawyer’s suspicion about their motives, the Carleton men go to work. The father (Roland Young) becomes a salesman for the “Flying Wombat,” a futuristic car, and son Richard (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) gets a job as a mail clerk. But soon Miss Fortune’s goodness and generosity make them re-think their scheme. —TCM