In this movie, a variant on the "fallen woman" genre, Ruth (Nancy Carroll) is an all-American gal who, after putting in her hours at the town bank, enjoys her weekend fun at the Willow Springs dance hall. That's where she meets Romer (Cary Grant), a wealthy city gentleman who, smitten with Ruth, invites her and friends to a late night party at his lakeside summer home. Romer's a perfect gentleman, but bitter gossips assume it can only mean one thing when a strange man drives Ruth home in the morning. Fired from her job and shunned by the town, poor Ruth has no allies against the slander: even her own mother (Jane Darwell) is more worried about the family reputation than her daughter's feelings. Can Ruth salvage her reputation in her small-minded community with a quickie marriage to a childhood friend (Randolph Scott)? Or should she dismiss all the gossips and follow her heart back to Romer instead?
Screenwriter Josephine Lovett, who also penned the Joan Crawford star-maker Our Dancing Daughters (1928) knew how to create virtuous-yet-vivacious flapper roles that flattered the new generation of ingénues like Nancy Carroll. It didn't hurt that a lax production code allowed a critical portrait of small-town America as judgmental and money-obsessed ("Immoral women shouldn't work in banks, you know. They might corrupt the young dollar bills.") as well as honest moments like when Ruth, angry that her younger sister stole her good lingerie, pushes her down on the bed and pulls the offending panties off of her.
While it seems like a foregone conclusion to cast Grant as the most appealing man in town, the "Cary Grant" we know -- graciously virile, well-dressed, oft perplexed but never flustered -- had not yet been cemented by the neophyte actor. (The Awful Truth (1937) is the first fully-formed appearance of the familiar persona from The Philadelphia Story (1940) and North By Northwest (1959)). Gary Cooper had originally been cast as the love interest, with Grant as the childhood friend, but when Cooper dropped out, director William Seiter bumped Grant up to star billing and hired Randolph Scott -- the tall and handsome former college football star and heir of a well-to-do Southern family -- to fill the role Grant had departed.
This serendipitous casting shuffle brought Grant and Scott together into instant affinity. Even though from different backgrounds, the two men shared a love of drink and cigarettes, fancied dressing well, were canny about money (some say cheap) and instantly got each other's wry sense of humor. Historians cannot decide on a definitive answer about whether the two men were in fact romantic partners, but it is incontrovertible that soon after meeting, they set up a cozy home together in an apartment in the Hollywood Hills. (One biographer noted that the more austere Grant cared nothing for furnishings, so the men decided on a division of labor wherein Scott was in charge of interior design, while Grant was responsible for keeping both men in nice suits and top-shelf booze.)
Promotional photos of Grant and Scott enjoying their "bachelor apartment" exist, and as unreliable as promotional photos can be about the truth of movie star's lives, the men look genuinely happy as they sun themselves poolside or tuck into breakfast together. Grant and Scott lived together on and off for a decade, an arrangement that outlasted Grant's brief and unhappy marriage to Virginia Cherrill in 1934 -- a marriage that may have been demanded by his employers to deflect uncomfortable attention from his contented home life with Scott.
Despite Hot Saturday not doing well at the box office, and being panned by critics (with the New York Times pointing out how the behavior of its characters was more in keeping with the Jazz Age than the newly sober Depression) Grant's star still remained on the rise through the 1930s. Mae West -- always a keen judge of male sex appeal -- soon cast him in She Done Him Wrong (1933) and I'm No Angel (1933), roles that brought him even more swooning acclaim. But regardless of the individual artistic merits of Hot Saturday, the opportunities it presented in Grant's career -- and his personal life -- mark it as an essential turning point in the making of Cary Grant, movie star.
Violet LeVoit
Sources:
A.D.S. "Hot Saturday (1932) Malicious Gossip." The New York Times, November 5, 1932
Eliot, Marc. "Cary Grant: A Biography". Three Rivers Press, 2005
