Borrowing Trouble
Cast & Crew
Frank R. Strayer
Jed Prouty
Shirley Deane
Spring Byington
Russell Gleason
Kenneth Howell
Film Details
Technical Specs
Synopsis
Roger Jones makes the acquaintance of a young orphan boy named Tommy McGuire, who has been raised by his hoodlum brother Lester. Roger's father, pharmacist John Jones, comes home to announce that he is the new vice-president of Big Brothers, an organization that cares for underprivileged boys. When Jones learns about Roger's new friend, he reveals that Tommy is infamous among the Big Brothers for his incorrigibility. Judge Walters at the juvenile hall talks Jones into letting Roger and Tommy be friends so that Roger can positively influence the young ruffian. Jones agrees to give Tommy a job, alongside Roger, as a delivery boy at his pharmacy, and after Tommy saves the youngest Jones, Bobby, from a falling ladder at sister Bonnie's wedding rehearsal, Jones praises the remarkable improvement in Tommy's work in school and at the pharmacy. On a Sunday evening, Tommy and Roger borrow Jones's spare key to the pharmacy to retrieve their school books. Tommy then returns to the poolroom where Lester and his cronies, Charlie and Joe, hang out and realizes that he's neglected to return the key to Roger. Charlie keeps Tommy at the poolroom on a pretense and steals the key. Discovering that the key is missing, Tommy goes to the pharmacy, where he sees his brother, Charlie and Joe robbing the safe. They flee and Roger arrives and notices that the safe's been robbed. Tommy says that he must have lost the key on his way and does not admit that he caught the hoodlums in the act of stealing the money. When the police are called in, two witnesses identify Roger and Tommy as being at the scene of the crime, and the boys confess but Tommy refuses to squeal on his brother and his brother's friends. As the hoodlums next plan to rob a bank, Lester announces his intention to clear Tommy, but Joe hits him over the head before the other two flee to conduct their heist. When he awakens, Lester calls the Jones's house during Bonnie and Herbert's wedding ceremony and tells Tommy to tell the truth about the robbery and that the criminals are holding up another bank as they speak. Roger, Tommy, Jones and Uncle George, the minister, along with police, rush to the crime scene, and Bonnie and Herbert exchange vows in a moving police car. At the airport, where the gangsters try to escape on a plane, gunfire is exchanged, and the gangsters give themselves up to Sergeant Kelly. A reformed Lester is reunited with his brother, and Uncle George wakes up from a swoon to pronounce the final vows over the union of Bonnie and Herbert.
Director
Frank R. Strayer
Cast
Jed Prouty
Shirley Deane
Spring Byington
Russell Gleason
Kenneth Howell
George Ernest
June Carlson
Florence Roberts
Billy Mahan
Marvin Stephens
Andrew Tombes
Howard Hickman
Cy Kendall
Joseph Downing
George Walcott
Dick Wessel
Wade Boteler
Bradley Metcalfe
Margaret Fielding
Louis Jean Heydt
Nora Cecil
Georgia Cooper
Frank Dae
Ralph Dunn
John Dilson
Edwin Stanley
Franklin Parker
James Donlan
Cecil Weston
Ruth Robinson
Fred Kelsey
Crew
Robert Chapin
George P. Costello
Karen De Wolf
William Eckhardt
Hanson Fritch
Max Golden
Chester Gore
Herschel
Bernard Herzbrun
Samuel Kaylin
Harry M. Leonard
Edward Snyder
Film Details
Technical Specs
Quotes
Trivia
Notes
The plot summary was based on a screen continuity in the USC Cinema-Television Library. According to information in SAB, the film's title was changed to The Jones Family in Borrowing Trouble early in January 1938. Douglas Fowley is listed as a cast member in Hollywood Reporter production charts, but his participation in the final film is doubtful. According to information in the MPAA/PCA Collection at the AMPAS Library, PCA Director Joseph Breen, after reading the script for this film, wrote to the studio complaining that the marriage ceremony in the back of the car "as written, would seem to be almost a burlesque, to the point where the resulting scene might be considered a travesty on marriage." Breen advised that unless that scene were rewritten, "omitting all questionable comedy elements," the film would not be acceptable under the Production Code. The studio's subsequent filming of the scene did, in Breen's judgment, comply with the requirements of the Code. This was the first Jones Family film in which Marvin Stephens appeared. For more information on the series, please see the entry below for Every Saturday Night.
