Love in Pawn

Bernard Braden and Barbara Kelly are a happy couple. True, he doesn't earn much money as a painter of pigs, but his gig as a cartoonist pays enough to keep them going on a raffish houseboat, far from Canada and his uncle Laurence Naismith's logging and milling company. But more money is always nice, and when lawyer John Laurie shows up with ten thousand pounds from his uncle if he can demonstrate he's hard working and keeps himself and his wife decently, they agree. Laurie proposes to drop over to make sure, and they agree. However, when the young couple checks out the accounts to afford a few luxuries for Laurie, they discover themselves two shillings short of half a crown. They recall a recent story, head over a pawn shop, and put Braden in hock.

The next day, Laurie having been impressed, Miss Kelly returns to the shop to redeem Braden. Not only has she lost the pawn ticket, but the daughters of the house are making too much of a fuss over her husband. So she leaves him in pawn.

And the rest is the story, filled with minutiae of the pawn shop industry, painting, and Naismith's turn as Braden's uncle. He seems to have modeled his comic character on John Carradine, and is quite amusing. The rest of the movie is engaging enough, if a trifle mechanical in its progress. Even so, 80 minutes passed pleasantly.