Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Tuesday, Feb. 21 - The Church Mouse

The Church Mouse (1934)

It's a remake of yesterday - Beauty and the Boss.

The opening scenes show the historical development of Steele's Bank in London as it adopts first steel pens and then typewriters during the nineteenth century. In 1934 the current head of the bank Jonathan Steele is as technology-obsessed as his predecessors and installs an intercom and constantly flies by plane.

Steele strictly divides his life between work and pleasure. He dismisses a very attractive secretary who is distracting him by trying to seduce him at work, in order that they can become lovers after office hours. This creates a vacancy which a hard-pressed young woman Betty Miller who self-describes herself as a "church mouse" fills by showing Steele how super-efficient she is.

Miller rapidly becomes invaluable to Steele, but comes to resent the fact that only sees her as an employee rather than a woman. While in Paris, to seal a major business deal she has a major makeover, and suddenly finds herself attracting a much greater deal of male attention.

American actress Laura LaPlante, as a young woman looking for work in those Depression years, gets into his office by climbing through the window and impresses him with her secretarial skills. But, after falling in love with him, she soon finds out that he never mixes business with pleasure - whenever he wants to fool around with his secretary, he fires her first.

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