Search - Lady for a Day on DVD

MPAA Rating: NR Content Advisory: Suitable for Children Movie Release: 1933 DVD Release: 10/23/2001 Format: DVD - Black and White SwapaDVD Credits: 1 Number of Discs: 1 Run Time: 1 hrs 32 mins Studio: Image Entertainment Members Wishing: 6 Genres: Comedy, Comedy of Manners

May Robson plays Apple Annie, a slatternly Broadway apple peddler. Annie has a curious setup whereby she is able to finagle other street merchants and beggars to pony up part of their weekly earnings to her--yet she never seems to spend any of the money on herself. This is because Annie has a daughter named Louise (Jean Parker), who has been supported in luxury all her life by her mother. Louise has no idea who Annie really is; so far as she knows, her mother is Mrs. E. Worthington Manville, a Manhattan society matron. When Louise sends Annie a letter telling her that she's become engaged to a young Spanish nobleman named Carlos (Barry Norton), Annie is aghast: once Louise brings her fiance to New York, the jig will be up. Coming to the rescue is high-rolling gambler Dave the Dude (Warren William), who considers Annie his good-luck charm. With the help of his nightclub-thrush girlfriend Missouri Martin (Glenda Farrell), Dave arranges a huge society reception for Louise -- and a complete fashion makeover for Annie. To do this, a few strong-arm methods are required, notably the kidnaping of several society reporters; also, it's necessary to pass off down-and-out Judge Blake (Guy Kibbee) as Annie's well-connected husband. Lady for a Day is the film with which Frank Capra hoped to enter the Big Leagues by taking home a shelf-full of Academy Awards. His subsequent embarrassment at the 1934 Oscar ceremonies has now passed into Hollywood legend, but he made up for this debacle with his Oscars sweep for It Happened One Night. Lady for a Day was remade by Capra as 1961's Pocketful of Miracles, with Bette Davis as Apple Annie. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Warren William - Dave the Dude
May Robson - Apple Annie
Guy Kibbee - Judge Blake
Glenda Farrell - Missouri Martin
Ned Sparks - Happy McGuire

Frank Capra's first major comedy, Lady for a Day has gotten to DVD far ahead of his other early 30's features, in a sparkling new transfer -- this is mostly because Lady for a Day was bought back by Capra for his bigger budgeted 1961 remake, Pocketful of Miracles; thus, it's the property of his estate, rather than sitting in the vaults of Columbia Pictures, where it would likely have languished for another 20 years before showing up on DVD. The movie was available on a Criterion laserdisc during the early 1990's that was adequate by the standards of the time, but this disc does look better, despite some wear in the source material and a few errors in the transfer (astonishingly, the producers permit a hair to lie across the top of the screen in one shot about 10 minutes into the movie). Generally, this disc is a tribute to the reality that, even with a less-than-ideal source, DVD as a format is superior to laserdisc -- there are none of the playback anomalies that used to plague even well-pressed laserdiscs and properly adjusted machines, and the image is as good as (or better than) any theatrical presentation of the movie in recent decades. The picture has been given a good spread of chapter markers that come in at all the right points in the plot, and as a bonus we get Frank Capra Jr. discussing the movie on the secondary audio track -- Capra dwells on the overall pattern of his father's work as it was represented by the movie, and the subtleties of the movie's message, amid discussions of the plot elements that we see on the screen, without going into areas where he isn't that strong, such as the lives of the actors involved in the film. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide