Men On Her Mind (1944)
In PRC's
Men on Her Mind, Lily Durrell (
Mary Beth Hughes) wants nothing more than to be a singer. Unfortunately, men keep proposing to her or telling her that her proper place is in the home. She first meets redneck Joe Munroe (Lyle Latell) who wants her to be a housewife. Lily wants none of that, so she runs away to some other unnamed town where she witnesses the murder of a night club owner she just aditioned for, and runs away again.
In the next town she gets a job as a secretary for Roland Palmer (Alan Edwards), a rich, much older man who falls in love with her and wants to help launch her singing career. Lily is relunctant to accept his gift of singing lessons, so Roland admits he's in love with her and that he wants to win her love through making her a star. Unfortunately, his sister thinks Lily is just a gold digger and threatens to have her investigated, so Lily runs away . . . again.
This time she meets the rich, young and attractive Jeffry Wingate (Edward Norris) who falls in love with her and also helps her get some singing gigs. And this time, Lily falls in love with him as well. Everything is peachy until he proposes and gives her a diamond bracelet. The next morning Lily reads a story about a diamond thief in the paper and jumps to conclusions, thinking it's Jeffry. So she runs away. Again.
Next, she meets Jim Lacey (Ted North), a music teacher, who mistakes her for a Miss Andrews he's supposed to pick up for a new teaching job. Lily goes along, pretending to be Miss Andrews and Jim falls in love with her. But Roland finds her and has gotten her a gig to sing on the radio. So Lily goes, leaving Jim behind, and sings on the radio and fulfills her dream of being a singer. But now she has to choose who she wants to be with (and no, Jeffry didn't steal the bracelet). She chooses Jim, unsurprisingly. I thought she should've chose Jeffry, but I didn't write it.
Men on Her Mind is pretty standard PRC fare. It shares a lot of incidental music with two other PRC Mary Beth Hughes movies I've seen,
The Lady Confesses and
I Accuse My Parents. It also shares stock footage of a train with
I Accuse My Parents. Mary Beth Hughes and Edward Norrris were both quite good acting-wise, Ted North was a little wooden but still okay. Everyone else was adequate. If you like Mary Beth Hughes (I sure do!), you should definately check it out, because she looks great and there's a lot of her. imdb.com classifies this as a musical. It's not. I'd classify it as 'classic exploitation' or maybe 'romance.'
Trivia: Ted North was Mary Beth Hughes' real-life husband. After their divorce in 1947, he never appeared in another movie. She continued to appear in b-movies and TV shows until the late 1950s.
