Main Cast: Marie Dressler, Polly Moran, Anita Page, Norman Foster, Jacquie Lyn
Release Year: 1932
Country: US
Run Time: 87 minutes
Plot
Maggie Warren (Marie Dressler) is the matriarch of a banking family who has run the Warren Bank for years, until she turns it over to her son John (Norman Foster) to run, following his marriage to Helen (Anita Page). Maggie and Helen's mother Lizzie (Polly Moran) don't really get along that well, but they tolerate each other -- barely -- for the sake of the children and grandchildren. Then comes the stock market crash, and the Great Depression, and the wave of bank failures -- and a rumor that starts a run on Maggie's bank, just as her son has lost all of the personal bonds, with which she had always secured the depositors' holdings against such an emergency, in a get-rich-quick scheme that collapsed. It takes every bit of personal persuasiveness that Maggie can muster, along with a lot of luck, to keep the bank afloat, and Lizzie -- whose own holdings may have gone up in smoke with the rest of the bank's assets -- won't stop needling her. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
Review
Prosperity is a strange if well-intentioned movie. Some moments of it are almost Capra-esque, in its story about a family trying to keep the bank they own afloat, and save its depositors' assets -- in that sense, it resembles Frank Capra's American Madness, released three months earlier that same year. But neither the screenplay, co-authored by Sylvia Thalberg (sister of MGM production chief Irving Thalberg), nor the direction by Sam Wood, can ever seem to find a steady tone to take in the action -- part of the movie is broad physical comedy and slapstick, focusing on the rivalry and resentments between Marie Dressler's Maggie and Polly Moran's Lizzie; and part of it is serious topical drama about the fears of bank failure and economic ruin hovering over America in 1932. And those two parts never really meet or mesh, to such a degree that one could easily think it was a different movie that one were watching, if one skipped through various scenes that are juxtaposed right up against each other. And the comparison to American Madness makes this movie suffer even more -- where the latter had its moments of effective comic relief, mostly to relieve some of the tension of the drama and make the film wear better on the viewer, Prosperity relies on a lot of predictable if well-executed comedy from Dressler and Moran, but also, at one point, some ineffective (and, in fact, terribly un-funny) humor involving mis-labeled kitchen items. The whole film is something of a misfire, despite Dressler's efforts, and an odd curio from MGM, trying to grab a piece of topical urgency of the time in an awkward manner. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
