The Talk of the Town (1942) on Netflix
NR19421h 58mComedyDramaRomance
Leopold Dilg, accused of burning a mill and killing its foreman, escapes jail mid-trial. He hides in the cottage his former schoolmate Nora Shelley has rented to law professor Michael Lightcap.
- Netflix4.1/5
- IMDb7.5/1010,141 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes89%
Trailer
Plot summary
Nora Shelley, a schoolteacher, has let her remote cottage to Michael Lightcap for the summer, and the law professor intends to write a book there in peace. Leopold Dilg, a mill worker and political activist, is on trial for setting fire to a woolen mill and killing its foreman, Clyde Bracken. He breaks out of jail and comes to Shelley, a former schoolmate he has had a crush on for years. Lightcap spots him almost at once, and Shelley tells the professor that the man is her gardener, Joseph. A senator then brings Lightcap news that the president means to name him to the Supreme Court. The professor and the fugitive fall into long arguments about the law, one speaking for the academic view and the other for the practical one.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Talk of the Town (1942)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Filming on The Talk of the Town was due to start on January 17, 1942, but George Stevens halted it that day and sent the cast and crew home after Carole Lombard, whom he had directed in Vigil in the Night (1940), was killed in a plane crash while selling war bonds.
- Jean Arthur earned only $50,000 for The Talk of the Town, roughly half of Cary Grant's $106,250 and less than Ronald Colman's $100,000, partly because of her ongoing conflict with Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn.
- With two leading men, Cary Grant and Ronald Colman, both used to having the lead to themselves, George Stevens filmed both possible endings of who Jean Arthur's character would marry and left it to test audiences to determine the preferred one.
- The film began as Mr. Twilight, but Cary Grant insisted the title be changed, suspecting that if it looked like a film about the single male character Ronald Colman, the better role, Colman would steal the show. Columbia traded the rights to Sin Town to Universal to get The Talk of the Town.
- Rex Ingram's part as Ronald Colman's valet was, at the time, a rare example of a non-stereotypical role for an African-American actor.
