Cinema Revisited: Hold Em Yale has colorful characters and snappy dialog
“Hold Em Yale”
Directed by Sidney Lanfield. Cast: Patricia Ellis, Cesar Romero, Buster Crabbe, William Frawley, Andy Devine ,George Barbier, Warren Hymer, George E. Stone.
Released April 27, 1935. Running time: 61 minutes.
The Damon Runyon source material allows for colorful characters, while the script is filled with snappy dialog in this delightful B-level comedy from Paramount Pictures. Patricia Ellis plays a rich socialite with a weakness for uniforms. Every time she gets mixed up with a guy (even if he is merely wearing the uniform of a movie usher) her wealthy father pays him off. Cesar Romero is part of a group of hoodlums who reads about the socialite in the newspaper, and woos her as a French soldier, complete with stolen uniform. However, her father has had enough, and disinherits her. As a result, the Romero character runs out on her, leaving her with the gang.
Most of the fun occurs when the socialite is staying with the gang members, each of whom is a quintessentially Runyonesque character. The studio was smart to carefully cast actors who can offer just the right charisma in these roles: William Frawley, Andy Devine, George E. Stone, and Warren Hymer. The woman’s domestic revamping of the gang’s lifestyle is especially funny. When she wakes them at 7, a shocked Hymer states, “look at that glare in the window, it must be 7 in the morning!” as if he’d not been awake at that hour in years. The crude bunch is expected to dress nicely for dinner and maintain a certain level of dignity with proper table manners. She even puts the Frawley character on a diet. The woman effectively bosses them around in a most amusing manner.
The gang eventually realizes she comes from wealth, and plans to return her safely to her father for a price. Her father decides this domestic life is good for her, and refuses to pay any ransom. They eventually decide to help her father in his quest to marry her off to the timid, bookish character played by Buster Crabbe, who specialized in such parts until redefining his career in heroic roles like Flash Gordon, Buster Crabbe, and Billy “The Kid” Carson. In another of the film’s highlights, they all attend a football game where the hardly-athletic Crabbe character is being forced into playing by his father with the help of the gangsters.
Because it was made for the studio’s B unit, and slated for the second spot on a double feature program, “Hold Em Yale” is briskly paced and is pleasant and amusing throughout. As with most competent programmers, it breezes by without wasting a second. Like other 1930s B movies, part of the fun is spotting familiar faces in small parts, this one including Lon Chaney Jr., Grant Withers, and perennial movie drunk Arthur Housman.
Patricia Ellis came to Hollywood amidst a lot of ballyhoo, appearing in Warner features like “Elmer the Great” with Joe E. Brown and “Footlight Parade” with James Cagney. However, her performances always came off as rather stiff. She is good in this film, and would later appear in perhaps the movie for which she is best known, “Blockheads” with Laurel and Hardy.
When “Hold Em Yale” was first released, the review in Film Daily called it “a very amusing comedy, well handled all around, and should click nicely with any audience. It is one of the better Damon Runyon stories with action that moves along at a fair clip, and a tang in its comedy.”