Lovely Ruth thinks twice about Mr Pencil Mustache's latest offer, one which does not involve marriage.
Dreaming of having his own humour column, henpecked Ellery Cushing cranks out one-liners by day in his study. By night he is a copy editor at the local newspaper until he's canned by a cranky, penny-pinching boss. Cushing is rescued from poverty by an old newspaper buddy who helps him parlay his mountain of jokes about the follies of domestic life into a new job in radio.
Crumpled old Cushing is the timid voice of traditional values that keep his family together. William Collier Sr does a good job depicting the exhausted head of the family, a man struggling against the challenges of modernity. His pretty daughter Ruth is steps away from a ruined life at the hands of a millionaire creepster, and his son Robert is an enthusiastic but naive supporter of "proletariat" politics; both hound him for money and are apparently too lazy to actually look for work. More typical of earlier Monogram productions (i.e., Beggars in Ermine), this film recognizes the contemporary politics and events of mid-30s America. In fact, A Successful Failure is explicitly anti-Communist. By the film's end Cushing has denounced rabble rousing, decried the fall of Wall Street and praised the New Deal. Despite the reactionary tone that makes an everyday father a "successful failure," the film likely struck its contemporary viewers as realistic and relevant.
You can tell they are Communists, because they meet in the dark with torches!
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