I guess I was expecting a gritty tale from the height of the Great Depression, 1934. Then too, I'm seeing a First National Production and conflate that with their merger with tough-minded Warner Bros. Unfortunately, the movie unfolds more like a soap opera than the gritty Warner Bros tale I was expecting. Four buddies graduate college expecting easy avenues to go along with their gilded status. Instead, they get the uncertainties and shoestrings that the working class experiences as breadlines and park benches. For sure there's lots of story potential here. But instead, of gravitas we get lightweight characters bouncing around in amiable fashion. In fact, there are two sobering moments reflecting the desperate times, but these get folded quickly into the general bonhomie characterizing the film as a whole.
A couple of conjectures on the film. For one, it's Code-Approved in censorship's first year of Hollywood enforcement. Unfortunately, that same censorship worked to empty movie content of anything that might reflect on moral, political, or economic sacred cows, and was in fairly rigorous effect for the next 30-years. Thus the film may have had reason to over-compensate away from its grim potential. Second, a large number of personal stories are crammed into a short runtime, 75-minutes. Thus, from a more narrative standpoint, focus bounces from here to there, weakening those few more serious moments. Anyway, folks like me who may be looking for insight into a Depression era upper-class are apt to be disappointed. Too bad, because today's college graduates face many of the same bleak prospects, minus the assured Hollywood ending.