HOT SATURDAY. Paramount Pictures, 1932. Cary Grant, Nancy Carroll, Randolph Scott, Edward Woods, Lilian Bond, William Collier Sr., Jane Darwell. Director: William A. Seiter.

   Hot Saturday isn’t the best or the most salacious of the pre-Code films, but it’s nevertheless a punchy little melodrama. Directed by William A. Seiter, Hot Saturday stars Cary Grant, in his first leading role, as Romer Sheffield, a perpetual bachelor, playboy, and host of elaborate parties who falls for Ruth Brock (Nancy Carroll), a bank clerk put off by her hometown’s catty and gossipy ways.

   She is the victim of a small town mentality that wants to know what everyone else is up to and who is sleeping with whom. After staying for a few extra hours at Sheffield’s (Grant’s) house after a dating misadventure with another man, she becomes the topic of salacious discussion, with the town’s women suggesting that she spent the night with Sheffield.

   The poor girl is shunned by her peers and is even fired from her job at the bank. Fortunately for her, childhood friend Bill Fadden (Randolph Scott), now a prominent geologist, arrives back in town and confesses he’s always loved her. It’s not an easy thing for him to express in words, for Fadden’s very awkward with the ladies. Marriage, it would seem, is in the cards. It’s to be Ruth’s escape from the small town that has, through idle and false gossip, turned against her.

   But it is not to be.

   At a party, Fadden discovers that Ruth has withheld information about her past and about the non-existent scandal. He’s angry and hurt. He yells at her and thinks the worst of her, disbelieving her attempts to explain away the gossip as the malicious workings of a bored small town’s collective imagination. If anything, this scene exemplifies Scott’s ability to portray a man consumed with rage, a type of character quite distinct from his roles in the Zane Grey westerns.

   Ruth is then faced with a choice. Does she go after Fadden and beg him to take her back? No. She runs to Sheffield and spends the night with him, making what was only a false rumor a veritable truth. And she’s not ashamed of her behavior one bit. In fact, it’s a liberating moment for her, freeing her from what she perceives to be the shackles of small town Americana mores.

   In Hot Saturday, the girl eschews the good guy for the playboy and drives off into the wider world with him. And she’s happy. Elated, in fact. It’s not the most creative, or shocking, ending to a film, but it’s the type of movie ending that wouldn’t be so easily replicated once the Production Code went into full effect in 1934. Grant’s quite good in this one too, although he’s not nearly the screen presence he would become in the decades ahead.