... and try to deal with the Great Depression with only their wits to serve them. What do they have in common? In a society that has shed all cultural extras as nonessentials, suddenly they have no profession.
Jaret Otkar (Warner Baxter) has a bankrupt antique shop and everything is auctioned off but Napoleon's bed which the auctioneer can't even get a quarter for, so he lets Jaret keep it. A starving violinist, Martin Rosenberg (Walter Woolf King) comes into the shop after the auction, Jaret feeds him, and the two decide to team up for survival. Now Jaret is realistic and stoic towards almost everything that happens to him except this one thing - he decides to wheel the bed into Central Park and sleep there. The next morning a cop tells the two to move along. The two encounter a kindly maintenance man, Mr. Sweeney (Roger Imhof) who lets them store their bed in his toolshed and sleep there in return for violin lessons from Rosenberg, who is less than enthusiastic about the prospect. Later the two encounter homeless actress Elizabeth Cheney (Janet Gaynor) and now the team is a threesome.
Cheney acts as the housekeeper for the three, Rosenberg keeps a roof over their heads with his violin lessons, and Otkar is a businessman, so he is central to them not starving. He comes up with schemes that include distracting a Central Park Zoo caretaker so he can steal some of the meat intended for the lions. Helping them out is the maintenance man that got them the shed in the first place, with some occasional bread and tea and blankets.
Sweeney and his wife are lucky. They both have unskilled but necessary jobs, so their modest but steady living probably shoves them into the middle class. But then their bank fails. And now all are just trying to get through the winter to the titular "one more spring".
So the trio not only has the challenge of survival, two of them have to deal with a fellow that doesn't seem to understand the peril of his own situation - Rosenberg. He is very rude to people who are in a position to help him, thinks he is too good to play his violin for passers by, and is just disagreeable in general. I'm not sure why he is made so obnoxious except maybe this was to contrast with the rather sweet and generous personalities of the other characters.
Warner Brothers is mainly known as the studio that spent the most time on the Great Depression with all of their films about gangsters, people who turn to crime out of necessity, and even Broadway shows with the backdrop of the Great Depression. But this little entry from Fox takes a completely different tack on those hard times and it is different from anything else of its genre I've seen and is definitely worth your time.
