Fight For Your Lady (1937)

Marietta on stage in evening dress Ham Hamilton (Jack Oakie) is a personable but penniless wrestling trainer. At a match where the audience all seem to be wealthy and well-dressed, he borrows a man's coat and hat for disguise to evade creditors. He returns the coat the next day -- its owner is a rich man, Robert Densmore (John Boles), and the unlikely pair strike up a friendship. Densmore is in love with Marcia Trent (Margot Grahame) and they are engaged, but Ham has seen through her and realises she is nothing more than a gold-digger.

Ham contrives to tell Marcia that Robert is broke and she immediately calls off the announced wedding. Robert goes to Budapest to forget Marcia, and he takes Ham as his companion. While there he goes to a variety theatre where a beautiful girl, Marietta (Ida Lupino), does a ventriloquist act, in male evening clothes.


Ham arrives dressed as his Mother Densmore falls in love with her, and they spend the evvning together, but we learn that Marietta has a fiercely jealous husband, Spadissimo (Erik Rhodes), the finest swordsman in Europe. Well, Spadissimo returns and very quickly a duel is arranged, and Spadissimo is obviously going to win. Marcia and her mother are racing to the site of the duel in a car and Ham manages to go with them. Marcia reveals that Spadissimo will never kill anyone who has a mother, and Ham arranges to change clothes with Marcia's mother. He acts out the part of a tearful mother, and begs Spadissimo to spare Densmore, which he readily does, being easily moved by a mother's pleas.

The style of the action is very dated, and a lot of the activity looks artificial and unexplained; in 1937 this must have seemed a natural way to rpesent an action film.

HF December 2009


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