User Reviews

May Robson stars as wealthy woman Hannah Bell in "You Can't Buy Everything" from 1934, in the days when studios cranked out these kind of films with assembly-line precision. Robson portrays a very wealthy woman who does not live like one. She is a notorious cheapskate, living in a seedy apartment, wearing old tattered clothing, making her sick young son stay in a free ward in a hospital, and guarding her money in the bank like a hawk. Hannah has become a bitter old woman, stemming from a beau (Lewis Stone) who rejected her from 30 years earlier. Her vendetta against him borders on the pathological at times, and when her now grown son (William Blakewell) wants to marry he ex-beau's daughter, trouble ensues. Hannah tries to destroy her ex-beau, through a bank scare in the early 1900's, alienating her now married son. This is not a perfect film, but May Robson is wonderful, as she was in every film from this era. There are some fine supporting performances as well. The ending is a bit on the fairy-tale side, but Robson is the main reason to watch.

In the list of many legendary now deceased New Yorkers is Hetty Green, known back in the late 1800's as the stingiest woman who ever lived, so cheap that she would probably squeeze a nickle until the buffalo pooped. Probably due to the threat of a lawsuit, MGM's version of her alleged story was changed to a fictional character named Mrs. Hannah Bell, an embittered widow who amasses a fortune after losing hers thanks to bad business deals her fortune-hunting late husband had made with her money. She so resents banker Lewis Stone that she pulls all of her money out of the bank he's taken over, and when her son (William Bakewell) falls in love with Stone's daughter (Jean Parker), Robson determinedly vows that the marriage will never take place. But nothing is shown to indicate what Hannah did to try and prevent the marriage; The next scene automatically skips to a wedding in a church, and Robson standing by watching her son and his new wife board a carriage to head off to their European honeymoon. When the market crashes, Robson pays off the creditors of Stone's bank, pretty much bankrupting him, and when the newlyweds return, confrontation between mother and son leads to possible permanent estrangement.

While always feisty and often imperious, Robson never played a character with such a mean spirit, and even if she isn't as notoriously cruel in her cheapness as the real Hetty Green was, she certainly ain't no "Lady For a Day" here. The wonderful thing about the depression as far as movies were concerned was the abundance of stories given to older actors, and Robson would obviously be the first choice for this part since MGM's very popular Marie Dressler was ailing around the time of the making of this film and would die the year of its release. But even Dressler, whose wide eyes expressed a huge heart underneath some of her character's imperiousness, could ever play such blatant cruelty. Robson, even with her lovable nature, was more adept in exploring the darker side of the human soul, and really digs into what makes this character so harsh. Bakewell has a rather dark demeanor, so it takes some time to accept him as a romantic lead.

The film really goes out of its way to explore the dark days of New York at the turn of the century, starting some 20 years before when a younger Hannah (still played by Robson) took her pre-teen son (Tad Alexander at this point) to the hospital and checked him into the charity ward. A few times, Hannah does allow her heart to take over her purse strings, such as when she encounters an almost toothless cleaning woman and gives her money to see a dentist. But even with those momentary lapses of humanity, Hannah isn't somebody you'd consider the "grandmotherly" type. In the end, though, she atones as predicted, while the real life counterpart seemed to get more tight with her money as she aged, even living in slum like apartments to avoid the taxes a mansion would give her and not paying her electric bill, thus having to live off of cold soup.

Mary Forbes is excellent as Robson's old friend who tries to bring her out of her bitterness with little success (until the end), while Stone never looses his cool, even when Robson momentarily brings him down. Other memorable character performances are Reginald Mason as Robson's doctor and Claude Gillingwater as one of Robson's banking associates. Maybe one day somebody like Kathy Bates or Shirley MacLaine can play the real Hetty Green (that would be a story worth telling), but in the meantime, we have the Hollywood golden age version which fictionalizes much of the tale but still remains a memorable drama of an era we'll never see the likes of again.

This film is not easy to describe. I guess you can call it the antithesis of a romance drama. A woman, played by May Robson, gets burned by the man she once loved and she decides to focus on taking care of herself and her young son. Along the way she scrimps and saves and builds up a tiny fortune. But her financial worth, the only thing she's managed to make of her life, becomes her obsession. It alienates her son when he grows into a young man, and he turns away from her by marrying a woman who is the daughter of his mother's archenemy. To say this MGM film is loaded with tension and melodrama at every turn is an understatement.

What makes it all the more interesting is it's based on the life of a frugal lady financier of the late 1800s and early 1900s named Hetty Green. We may not wish to believe a woman like this could ever exist, but she apparently did. The scenes where May Robson play the "witch of Wall Street" at her hardest and most ruthless are cinematic gold, however. Robson understands what drives a woman to be so uniquely misanthropic and the moments where she gets to rail at society and her ex-lover, played by Lewis Stone, are quite good. Of course, the screenwriters only take her so far, and she eventually has to soften and start reforming. That comes by giving her pneumonia, which forces the woman to reconcile with her son and daughter-in-law.

Most of it works as a compelling motion picture, thanks in large part to the performances. However, the dialogue gets a bit preachy as the others try to instill their own sense of decency on Robson's character to make her rethink her approach to life. But maybe audiences needed to see a female Scrooge, to see that a woman might have all the money in the world, but if she doesn't have love, then she's not really rich at all.