February 11, 1933
Release Date

6.4

Child of Manhattan (1933)

Name: Child of Manhattan
Genre: Romance, Drama
Released: 1933-02-11

1h 10m

Running Time

February 11, 1933
Release Date

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Network & Production Companies

Plot.

Paul Vanderkill is extraordinarily wealthy because his grandfather happened to buy farmland in what was to become Midtown Manhattan. The Loveland Dance Hall is one of the tenants of the Vanderkill estates. To reassure his aunt Sophie, Vanderkill visits Loveland to determine whether it is as disreputable as Sophie suspects. There he meets a dime-a-dance girl, Madeleine MacGonagal, who charms him with her quaint proletarian accent. They begin a secret affair, which turns into a secret marriage when pregnancy ensues. When the baby fails to survive, Madeleine decides that since he had married her only for the baby's sake, she should make haste to Mexico to secure a divorce. There she meets Panama Canal Kelly, a former suitor who now owns a silver mine. Her plans for divorce and quick remarriage are complicated when Vanderkill arrives to confront her.

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Details.

Release Date
February 11, 1933

Status
Released

Running Time
1h 10m

Genres
Romance Drama

Last updated: 2025-02-11

This Movie Is About.

baby

pregnancy

divorce

pre-code

Wiki.

Child of Manhattan is a 1933 American pre-Code melodrama film based on the play Child of Manhattan by Preston Sturges, which was presented on Broadway in 1932. The film was directed by Edward Buzzell and written for the screen by Gertrude Purcell, and stars Nancy Carroll, star of musical comedies at Paramount, John Boles, and cowboy star Charles "Buck" Jones.

This was the second of Sturges' plays to be adapted into a film, after Strictly Dishonorable. "Most of the wittier and more pungent lines were lost in translation." "As Andrew Horton notes, Sturges appears to have had a fascination with [...] inter-class narratives, and a number of his plays, screenplays, and films contain 'sudden transitions in socioeconomic status'. [...] "His 1932 play Child of Manhattan, subsequently made into a movie by Columbia Pictures (Edward Buzzell, 1933), involves the relationship of the son of the immensely wealthy Paul Vanderkill with a dime-a-dance girl".