Brooklyn Orchid

Knockabout guys William Bendix and Joe Sawyer, a pair of millionaire taxi owners are just bored stiff at a party that Bendix's wife Grace Bradley is throwing for society. The water off Brooklyn Heights is as good as it is off Sheepshead Bay so they decide to go fishing. What they fish from the drink is suicide wannabe Marjorie Woodworth, the Brooklyn Orchid.

That's the contest she won a year before in Coney Island, but she's bored with her life now, it ain't no bed of roses for a beauty contest winner. But Woodworth is a student of Oriental philosophy and she believes like the Chinese, a life saved is a life owned.

Take Bendix's other and more famous Brooklyn character Chester A. Riley and give him a couple of million dollars and you've got Tim McGuerin. Unlike Riley, McGuerin married a stripper and Bradley does not like to be reminded from whence she came. This society bash she's giving is rather important to her.

Brooklyn Orchid was the first of three films the quartet of Bendix, Sawyer, Bradley and Woodworth made from these characters. They were done at Hal Roach Studio and Roach was lucky to grab Bendix right before he signed with Paramount and became one of their steadiest working character players. And also before he created Chester A. Riley for radio and then television.

Brooklyn Orchid is an easy to take B picture from the Roach Studio. One thing I didn't understand was not one reference to the Dodgers who had won the National League pennant the year before.