‘Rings on Her Fingers’ (1942)

Brooklyn shopgirl Susie Miller (Gene Tierney) gets spotted by the high society Worthingtons (played by Spring Byington, doing a sharp version of her usual daffy persona, and the mountainous yet spry Laird Cregar), a pair of grifters who lure her into being the bait for millionaire suckers. She falls for one of the suckers (Henry Fonda), a sweetly naive motormouth who’s actually not rich. They run away together and we spend the whole movie wondering when he’ll find out the awful truth. As scripted by Ken Englund and directed by Rouben Mamoulian, this is a light, fast, highly verbal romantic comedy with sexual sparks and–like the Worthingtons–a convincingly wealthy gloss over its opportunist heart. Made the year after Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve, it’s similar but pleasantly different. It’s now on demand from the 20th Century Fox Cinema Archives.