Min and Bill
About Min and Bill
Min Divot (Marie Dressler) keeps a dockside inn and is raising Nancy (Dorothy Jordan), whom she took in as a baby, while fighting and looking after the drunken fisherman Bill (Wallace Beery), who lives upstairs. She hides money and sends Nancy to boarding school so the girl will not grow up on the wharf. Nancy comes back engaged to Dick Cameron. Then Bella Pringle (Marjorie Rambeau), Nancy’s mother, a prostitute, shows up and threatens the match. Min shoots Bella with a gun she had kept hidden, means to run with Bill, watches Nancy leave on the honeymoon boat, and turns herself in.
Cast & crew
More about Min and Bill
George W. Hill directed and produced with Harry Rapf. Frances Marion and Marion Jackson adapted Lorna Moon’s 1929 novel Dark Star. Harold Wenstrom photographed. MGM released it on 29 November 1930. In 1931 the studio issued a Spanish-language version, La fruta amarga, directed by Arthur Gregor with Virginia Fábregas and Juan de Landa.
Themes
Making
Hill shot a pre-Code waterfront story in which the comic fights between Min and Bill sit next to a murder. Marion and Jackson took the plot from Moon’s Dark Star and kept the dock, the school fees, and Bella.
Audiences
The picture was a large commercial hit for MGM, reported at about $2,000,000.
Look
Harold Wenstrom photographed the waterfront inn, the boarding-school send-off, and the dock where Min watches Nancy’s honeymoon boat leave.
Preservation
A print survives and has circulated from the MGM library, including a copy on Wikimedia Commons.
Notes
- Marie Dressler won the Academy Award for Best Actress for Min at the ceremony held in 1931.
- Wallace Beery’s Oscar the next year, for The Champ, is a different film. The pairing here is what led MGM to cast them as a married couple in Tugboat Annie (1933).
- Dressler led Quigley Publications’ exhibitors’ poll of top money-making stars in both 1931 and 1932. She died of cancer in July 1934.
- Beery’s 1932 MGM contract required that he be paid one dollar a year more than any other actor on the lot.
- DeWitt Jennings and Don Dillaway are in the supporting cast, with Russell Hopton.
Awards
- Academy Award for Best Actress (Marie Dressler), 1931
Scenes
- Min and Bill brawl through the inn, then she counts out the money for Nancy’s school.
- Nancy returns engaged to Dick Cameron, and Bella arrives on the same waterfront.
- Min shoots Bella, watches the honeymoon boat, and gives herself up to the police.
Influenced by
- Dark Star (Lorna Moon, 1929)
Influenced
- Tugboat Annie (1933)
- La fruta amarga (1931)
Also available
- Wikimedia Commons (Min and Bill.webm)
