February 6 movie: Come and Get It. Edward Arnold plays an ambitious lumberyard boss who falls in love with a saloon girl (Frances Farmer) but ditches her to marry the boss' daughter. Decades later he meets the saloon girl's daughter (also Frances Farmer), falls for her and competes with his own son (Joel McCrea) for her! Freaky!
I recorded this because of Joel McCrea, but it turns out he only has a small part. The movie is really about Arnold and Farmer. Also Walter Brennan, who plays Arnold's Swedish best friend. The title card at the beginning suggested the movie was going to be about the negative environmental impact of unchecked logging. Which seemed pretty forward-thinking for 1936. But the movie completely dropped that angle in favor of the soapy melodrama.
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the big problem with walter brennan's character is that whenever he has a serious scene it's so jarring -- like having the swedish chef show up to deliver a somber eulogy.
after checking on imdb to see where in his career this movie fell (since brennan looked so young compared to the crusty old western sidekick i always think of him as) i learned that it was actually somewhere in the early middle of his over 200 movies. many of them described as uncredited. i wonder if those were cameos.