Spring Tonic
Cast & Crew
Clyde Bruckman
Lew Ayres
Claire Trevor
Walter King
Zasu Pitts
Jack Haley
Film Details
Technical Specs
Synopsis
On the night before her wedding, Betty Ingals walks out of the rehearsal angry at her milquetoast fiancé, Caleb Enix, because of his insistence on reasonableness and his lack of ardor. When he refuses to elope, Betty, with her clumsy, easily frightened maid Maggie in tow, sneaks into her car. Sykes, a snooping reporter, climbs onto their rumble seat as Betty heads upstate heedless of Maggie's warning that that part of the country is full of crazy people. As they near the Summit Lodge, Sykes is knocked into the bushes. Nearby, at the Melleh Bros. Wild Animal Circus, tiger trainer Lola rebukes her philandering husband Jose, who then opens the cage of Lola's tiger Mina so that Lola will be preoccupied while he pursues recreation. While searching for Mina, Lola comes across Giffen and Camebridge Nasher, two loony moonshiners, and promises to hire them as acrobats if they help find the tiger. Betty pays Matt, a partner of the Nashers in applejack production, ten dollars to stay in the lodge. When Jose serenades her under her window, Betty is excited to hear that he just wants to make love, rather than reason with her, like Caleb. After Maggie calls Caleb to tell him their location, Sykes arrives at the lodge. Betty denies her identity to him, but when Caleb arrives, Sykes takes notes as Betty explains that she is bored with him and cannot go through with the wedding. As Betty walks off arm in arm with Jose, Caleb, seeing Sykes about to phone in the story about their breakup, wraps the phone line around his neck. With Matt's help, Caleb drops Sykes into a cellar. When Lola arrives with her whip, Jose sneaks out. After Caleb receives advice from Matt that women prefer force to reason, he enters Betty's room, where Jose has returned. When Caleb asks if he intends to marry Betty, Jose leaves by the window, and after Betty closes the door on Caleb, she climbs out to Jose. To help Caleb, Matt kidnaps Maggie, thinking her to be Betty, and they drive off, but return when they discover that they really have Maggie. When Lola catches Jose embracing Betty, he tells Betty to wait in the loft of the barn and then runs from Lola. Caleb captures Jose for Lola, while Maggie falls into the cellar with Sykes. After Caleb ties up Jose, he instructs Caleb in courtship technique, explaining that he is in love with love, and tells him that Betty is waiting in the barn. As Caleb confronts Betty, the tiger comes into the barn. Although Caleb's first reaction is to run, he then grabs a whip and makes the tiger lie down and roll over. After the Nashers see this and tell Lola, she reclaims the tiger, whom she says she had tamed by never letting her forget that she is the master. With his whip, Caleb orders Betty down from the loft and kisses her passionately. Never having experienced such a kiss from him, Betty wants more. Lola returns to the circus with both the tiger and Jose encaged, as Caleb and Betty leave Maggie with Sykes.
Cast
Lew Ayres
Claire Trevor
Walter King
Zasu Pitts
Jack Haley
Tala Birell
Siegfried Rumann
Frank Mitchell
Jack Durant
Herbert Mundin
Henry Kolker
Laura Treadwell
Douglas Wood
Helen Freeman
Edgar Sherrod
Walter Brennan
Lew Kelly
Eddie Chandler
Arthur Housman
George Chandler
Wilfred Hari
Ed Dearing
Minnie
Crew
Jasper Blystone
Melville Brown
W. F. Fitzgerald
Jay Gorney
Frank Griffen
Eugene Grossman
H. W. Hanemann
Ray Harris
Edmund Hartmann
Hubert
Robert T. Kane
Arthur Lange
Philip Macdonald
Patterson Mcnutt
L. W. O'connell
Jack Otterson
J. Schmitz
Harold Schuster
George Waggner
Jack Yellen
Howard I. Young
Film Details
Technical Specs
Quotes
Trivia
Notes
Alternate titles for this film were Man-Eating Tiger and Hold That Tiger. Rose Caylor and Ben Hecht were married. According to Daily Variety news items, Melville Brown joined Fox to direct the film, but he asked for his release during the first week of shooting because he was dissatisfied with the treatment of the story and believed that some of the principal roles were miscast. Clyde Bruckman was borrowed from Columbia to replace Brown. Also, according to Daily Variety, Harold Schuster, formerly an editor, got his first directing assignment on this film doing additional scenes. According to the final shooting script in the Twentieth Century-Fox Produced Scripts Collection at the UCLA Theater Arts Library, Theresa Maxwell Conover was scheduled to play the role of "Mrs. Ingals." Minnie, who played "Mina," the tiger, was borrowed from the Los Angeles Zoological Gardens, according to a Hollywood Reporter news item. According to information in the Twentieth Century-Fox Records of the Legal Department, also at UCLA, T. L. Sappington, who wrote a story also entitled "Spring Tonic," which was published in Everybody's Magazine (Jun 1923), granted the studio the right to use the title.
