I just watched the last half hour or 45 minutes of a delightful old movie I’d never seen before — “The Young In Heart,” from 1938, starring Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Janet Gaynor, Paulette Goddard, Billie Burke and Roland Young.
When I was flipping across the dial, I checked out TCM, heard Fairbanks’ voice, and briefly thought it was Ronald Coleman. I was about to send a Facebook message to Ben Reeves, who starred in “Enter Laughing” and who had to do a sentence or two in a Ronald Coleman impression. Ben is 16, and so his parents had to bring him up to speed in the Ronald Coleman department.
Anyway, I started watching the movie and immediately got caught up in it. It’s about a family of con artists who have moved in with a little old lady (played by Minnie Dupree) hoping she’ll put them in her will. But they end up growing to love the old lady, and the two men in the family (Fairbanks Jr. as the son, Young as the father) end up enjoying the legitimate jobs they take as part of their cover story.
A commenter on IMDb says this was the movie David O. Selznick was making while trying to cast “Gone With The Wind” — in fact, Selznick had been planning to cast Goddard as Scarlett O’Hara until he saw Vivien Leigh’s screen test.
Anyway, it’s a charming little movie, and the old lady’s redemptive love is what puts the story over.