In Brief: Teenage Betty Grable, 1933

After posting an image of cowboy star Buck Jones earlier today (Classic Movie Daily subscribers will see it just below), I remembered I had some interesting bits I'd cut out of the Child of Manhattan article that I wrote for my second Pre-Code eBook (Now planned for release around June). Well, none of the Buck Jones stuff was as interesting as I recalled—the best paragraph is included in my Child of Manhattan article—but there was a decent paragraph about Betty Grable that didn't make the cut.

Above: Betty Grable and Jane Darwell in Child of Manhattan.

Teenage Grable's part in Child of Manhattan was small, only notable for the career that came after it. Here's the (too thick) paragraph that didn't make the final cut:

Buck Jones wasn’t the only screen legend appearing in Child of Manhattan. Betty Grable would have celebrated her sixteenth birthday during production in December 1932. She had arrived in Hollywood in 1928 and made her film debut as an unbilled chorine around the time of her thirteenth birthday in Fox’s widescreen musical extravaganza Happy Days (1930). Following that she appeared as a Goldwyn Girl in the chorus and musical numbers of three Eddie Cantor films, Whoopee! (1930), Palmy Days (1931), and The Kid from Spain (1932); she worked under the name Frances Dean in four comedies for Educational Films that were each directed by unfairly disgraced Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, who by then was also working under a pseudonym, William Goodrich; and she enjoyed her greatest success to date in a billed role—as Betty Grable—in the Wheeler and Woolsey comedy Hold ‘Em Jail (1932), where she played the Warden’s daughter and love interest to Bert Wheeler. In Child of Manhattan Grable earned billing for what turned out to be little more than a bit part as Madelaine’s younger sister. All the teenage actress gets to do is emerge from her bedroom and watch from the distance as Madelaine is tossed out of their home by their mother. Grable then sits down and sobs into the arm of a chair until her mother orders her to bed. A still photo picturing Grable in an unfamiliar dramatic scene opposite Child of Manhattan star Nancy Carroll appears in Tom McGee’s 1994 Grable biography, The Girl with the Million Dollar Legs, hinting at additional scenes that may have been cut.

I've previously posted a teaser article about Child of Manhattan on the site as well as a lengthy biography of star Nancy Carroll.