Trailer
Plot summary
Ezra Ounce is an eccentric multimillionaire whose main purpose is a nationwide campaign to raise American morals, and he wants his fortune to be inherited by upstanding relatives. He visits Matilda Hemingway, his cousin, in New York City. Barbara Hemingway, Matilda's daughter, sings and dances and is in love with Jimmy Higgens, a struggling singer and songwriter who is her thirteenth cousin. On Ezra's instructions, the family has ostracized Jimmy. Matilda's husband Horace meets Mabel, a showgirl stranded in Troy, on a train.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Dames (1934)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- One of the effects of the Production Code on Dames was a Busby Berkeley number that never reached the screen: it featured Joan Blondell in a cat-and-mouse fight and ended with her inviting everyone to "come up and see my pussy sometime". Producer Hal Wallis removed it before the Hays Office censors saw it.
- Joan Blondell was seven months pregnant when she filmed "The Girl at the Ironing Board" number, and her husband, cinematographer George Barnes, had to take care that her condition was not shown on screen.
- In the "I Only Have Eyes for You" number sung by Dick Powell to Ruby Keeler, every girl in the chorus wears a Ruby Keeler mask, yet in just about every shot the real Keeler passes briefly by the camera.
- At one point the dancer Eleanor Powell was suggested for a specialty number in Dames, but she declined to do it.
- Early casting considerations for Dames had Ruth Donnelly playing Mathilda instead of ZaSu Pitts, and Hobart Cavanaugh considered as Ellsworthy Todd.
- The Harry Warren and Al Dubin song "I Only Have Eyes for You" from Dames won an ASCAP Award in 1989 as the "Most Performed Feature Film Standard".
