6/10
Yet another runaway heiress
18 September 2009
If you believe films like "There Goes My Heart," every gal with money wanted to be poor in the 1930s and ran away from home. Thanks to the huge success of "It Happened One Night," the ambitious reporter-newsworthy heiress angle, the heiress disguised as a commoner, etc., was done over and over again - this film, "Love is News," "Bright Lights," "Anything Goes," "They Wanted to Marry," "Love on the Run" - I could go on.

Now we have "There Goes My Heart," where a young heiress (Virginia Bruce) gets away from her overprotective grandfather and escapes to New York. There, she meets a young woman (Patsy Kelly) who offers to share her apartment and helps her get a department store job. Meanwhile, a newspaperman (Fredric March) is on the story, but doesn't tell Bruce who he is.

As others have pointed out, Virginia Bruce, though lovely, was no screwball comedy star. Here she's in a Carole Lombard role. Patsy Kelly for me always gave a large, loud stage performance. She's very funny in this; other times I've found her annoying. Fredric March is quite relaxed in his role, and Eugene Palette is effective as the stereotypical editor who's always angry at his reporter. Harry Langdon has a nice cameo at the end.

There are some good scenes in this film, particularly the ice skating sequence, and Kelly's attempts to demonstrate the "Vibrato" exercise machine. The drunk scene between Palette, March, and Arthur Lake is good, too.

"There Goes My Heart" is filled with wonderful actors like Alan Mowbray and Marjorie Main, plus the aforementioned Langdom and Lake. It doesn't try to be more than it is, and it's successful in his own right if you don't expect too much.
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